Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/inside-team-romneys-whale-of-an-it-meltdown/

by shawndumas • 14 years ago

216 185 14 years ago

brudgers3• 14 years ago

From Slate back in July: an interesting background piece about the campaign's approach to staffing for data analysis.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/...

What the debacle brings to mind is the consequences of putting "idea guys" in charge of software development when there is a hard deadline.

"Orca had been conceived by two men—Romney's Director of Voter Contact Dan Centinello and the campaign's Political Director Rich Beeson."

I imagine them saying, "We shall have an app," while thinking, "How hard can it be?" While the developers were rationalizing, "Well, a web app is technically an app...and a lot easier to complete than an iPhone app, an Android app, and the web app we will still need to build for the old people with a Windows desktop."

eli5• 14 years ago

A Web App is actually the right call. It was for volunteers doing GOTV in the field, not as much for people sitting at a desktop. And you would want to be able to issue updates quickly and carefully control access -- things that are much more difficult with an App Store app.

lifeguard16• 14 years ago

Using Windows was a mistake, that's for sure.

Good thing for Democrats they didn't know about the open source ushahidi platform.

brudgers3• 14 years ago

"A Web App is actually the right call."

Yes.

Calling it "an app" however was a bad call. From a practical standpoint, that is. From the standpoint of "an idea guy" and a "communications expert" it was of course a requirement.

7952• 14 years ago

But so much can go wrong with an app, especially in the field. Give every team leader a fax machine, a phone, and some pens.

smsm4211• 14 years ago

There's nothing wrong with web app over mobile app. Actually, recently here on HN was a number of articles about coming trend of switching from native apps to HTML5/web apps. It is a valid choice, especially when you need to communicate a lot of data, so you need network connection anyway.

Of course, that web app needs to be working - but the choice itself is completely fine. Given the circumstances, I would seriously consider going the same direction if I had to do an app like that.

smacktoward2• 14 years ago

Orca had been conceived by two men—Romney's Director of Voter Contact Dan Centinello and the campaign's Political Director Rich Beeson...

To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm.

This sounds like a lot of failed IT projects in large corporations -- dreamed up by upper management types who don't know anything about tech, then farmed out to consultants and tech vendors for the actual implementation. The consultants and vendors then either proceed to wander in the weeds expensively due to lack of direction, or actively seize on the client's ignorance and take them for a ride.

The problem is that the people nominally in charge of the project, the upper management types, don't have the experience or expertise to know they're getting taken for a ride until it's too late. So there's no way to hold the contractors accountable, or to get the train back on the rails once it's jumped off.

incision2• 14 years ago

>This sounds like a lot of failed IT projects in large corporations -- dreamed up by upper management types who don't know anything about tech, then farmed out to consultants and tech vendors for the actual implementation. The consultants and vendors then either proceed to wander in the weeds expensively due to lack of direction, or actively seize on the client's ignorance and take them for a ride.

In my experience, this is 100% correct.

At least this mess has been exposed to some degree. There's something of a saying around these kind of projects to the effect of "This project -WILL- succeed".

The subtext being that that no matter what the facts are, the project will be promoted publicly as a success.

It's incredibly disheartening to see an abortive mess transformed into a sparkling success via fake dashboards, paid press and the like.

brazzy2• 14 years ago

O2 had such a "success" in Germany, to the tune of (IIRC) over 100M€. A colleague who was involved told me it had to be officially successful so they could at least write off the money as expenses.

aneth4• 14 years ago

Indeed. Particularly in contract to the Obama machine, which was built by passionate technologies motivated mostly to help Obama win, not make money.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

Interestingly, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said they built something similar in 2008, and it crashed too.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/messina-obama-won-on-the-...

rayiner2• 14 years ago

A cynic would say that this is just the software consulting version of what management consultants like Romney do.

brianchu• 14 years ago

Yes and no.

On one hand, management consultants are typically working with the executives of a company, and usually one of those executives will have been a former consultant (the executive boardrooms of companies are filled with them). Not to mention that both consultants and executives usually have the same set of "skills."

On the other hand, one former management consultant I spoke to told me that executives would often hire consultants to tell them what they already knew. The only purpose of bringing the consultants on-board was so that their recommendations would serve as political validation in case they had to explain their decision (i.e. if they failed).

aaronbrethorst• 14 years ago

And yet, despite this disaster,

    Mitt Romney’s campaign handed out more than $200,000
    in bonuses last month to senior staffers, according
    to new disclosure records filed Thursday.

    Richard Beeson, Romney’s national political director,
    received a $37,500 payment on Aug. 31 in addition to his
    salary, according to records filed with the Federal
    Election Commission.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/09...

When I first heard about this, I remarked to a friend "what the hell are they doing giving out bonuses? The bonus should be that your candidate gets elected!"

lifeguard16• 14 years ago

Wow, I thought the bonuses he gave out at the convention for winning the nomination made sense. I wonder what last month's were for, "winning" the debates?

eli5• 14 years ago

This is totally offtopic. I have no idea why he gave people bonuses in October, but I don't think it has anything to do with a system that apparently wasn't deployed until November.

smsm4211• 14 years ago

Some people are volunteers, and some people work for money. I see no problem in somebody getting paid a bonus for good work, and not everybody on the campaign should be in it for pure politics. And yes, it is possible to do a good work and still not have your candidate elected. After all, only one candidate wins, that does not mean everybody on other candidate's team sucked.

The Orca thing was obviously an epic fail, but that doesn't mean other people didn't deserve bonuses - maybe their part of the job was just fine.

MichaelApproved• 14 years ago

The bonuses in August were probably due to him winning the nomination. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/us/politics/delegates-get-...

He probably also had other unknown milestones throughout the campaign in an effort to keep staffers motivated.

lifeguard16• 14 years ago

The campaign could not manage launching a web app and they wanted to run the entire USA !?!?!?!

atomical• 14 years ago

Yes, people who make mistakes can still run the entire USA. It has been done before.

lifeguard16• 14 years ago

This kind of false equivocation is dishonest and intellectually lazy.

Jare• 14 years ago

This "mistake" is what most people would call 'utter incompetence'.

brudgers3• 14 years ago

Heck, I remember a Republican candidate who was amazed by the scanner at the supermarket checkout.

emmelaich• 14 years ago

You remember a report. Or a report of a report. The reporter wasn't even there.

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/bushscan.asp

pbhjpbhj• 14 years ago

Aren't you amazed by the scanner at a supermarket checkout? Omnidirectional laser scanners are a thing of beauty. (Yes I'm serious).

omd• 14 years ago

I don't know about you but there were days when I was trying to get a web app to support IE6 that I was envious of how easy the president has it.

smsm4211• 14 years ago

They already do. Federal government regularly fails spectacularly and it regularly costs us taxpayers billions. And so do local, state, municipal, etc. governments. Presenting it as if this is some unheard of failure that disqualifies everybody involved including the candidate is silly. A lot of successful websites failed, many multiple times and for prolonged period, despite employing top talent and spending millions on them. Failure is always an option.

WrkInProgress2• 14 years ago

Some key points -

1.) 11 database servers. 1 app server 2.) Not redirecting http to https 3.) not stress tested or apparently tested in any way 4.) users got their first taste of the system the morning of the election.

mrdodge2• 14 years ago

Sounds like Microsoft was trying to sell a few SQL server licenses.

CletusTSJY• 14 years ago

As a conservative and a software engineer, it's heartening that they at least had a plan and tried something. The fact that it was poorly implemented and unstable doesn't surprise me. Most last minute projects end up that way.

meepmorp4• 14 years ago

Zero training? A single web server? No end users even touching the system till it's time for mission critical use? No frigging redirect of http->https? And it looks like, as has happened more than once in my professional life, people outside of the management structure saw possible risks and were blown off by those in charge.

Even if you supported Romney, this has to give you some pause about the man's management skills and who he hired to run things.

mrdodge2• 14 years ago

He hired Microsoft and what sounds like a Microsoft Partner. No one gets fired for buying Microsoft.

jvehent• 14 years ago

Oh yes, people do get fired for buying microsoft. Switch industries and you'll see. Or try spending 2 years building your company knowledge base into sharepoint and you'll see.

smacktoward2• 14 years ago

Except Mitt Romney, apparently!

meepmorp4• 14 years ago

I meant the guys who he hired to take care of this stuff.

Of course, after Tuesday, they're all looking for work now.

acslater002• 14 years ago

It would give me more pause if Mitt Romney were involved personally in this sort of a project.

mnicole• 14 years ago

It all trickles down, right?

chris_wot6• 14 years ago

What, he didn't have any say in who he hired to make this work?

The POTA doesn't actually personally work on many projects. He relies on people to get them done. If Romney couldn't get something as crucial as this right, then how the heck would he have gone running the country?

jlgreco4• 14 years ago

If there is anything a president's job isn't, it is to micromanage.

rhizome7• 14 years ago

"The buck stops...somewhere else."

acdha6• 14 years ago

If he can't pick a reliable deputy to manage a single IT project how could he possibly manage a government? The President has to delegate well: Mitt either couldn't or didn't place a key service under someone reliable.

keypusher• 14 years ago

The CEO of any large company is usually not personally involved in the running of day to day operations. The president is not personally involved in the administration of Social Security, Medicare, the military, or any of the other multitude of services the government provides. But at the end of the day both are held responsible for the successful functioning of their organization. How can you be expected to run a country if you can't even run a campaign?

DanBC• 14 years ago

> Even if you supported Romney, this has to give you some pause about the man's management skills and who he hired to run things.

Wait, what?

There's a difference between people taking responsibility for what their staff do (thus, he should take responsibility for it) and people actually being responsible for what their staff do - especially if those staff are not staff but sub-contracted service providers.

meepmorp4• 14 years ago

If you don't hire people with adequate management skills to assess risk and take proactive steps to mitigate problems before they become dangerous to the mission, that's a failure at the highest level. Someone should've see this coming, or Romney clearly doesn't know how to delegate responsibility well.

chernevik2• 14 years ago

Leaders have to allocate attention to detail based on the strategic importance of that detail. The innovative application completely supplanting traditional Election Day strike list processes? The CEO had better be assured that's going to work by several different checks, and by multiple sources. Even then he probably had better have some backups in place.

I voted for Romney and yeah, this does have me reconsidering just how competent he is.

dblock• 14 years ago

The assumption that software can work from the first try is proven wrong, time and again. Software is something that needs to grow, mature and stabilize. The Romney campaign had the thing that's usually hardest to get - the human beta test resources. It should have been dry run for months.

lkrubner• 14 years ago

No one should allow a business or non-profit to face a situation like this. Only bad managers put something so important into such difficult circumstances. Why go live the day of the election? Are they insane?

Unless the contract (to build this application) had some kind of clause like "This thing must work perfectly or all the money will be refunded" then this is a great contract to get. Let us consider this cynically for a moment. I wish I could land contracts like this one. Can you imagine building an app that the client will only need for 1 day, and you still get paid even if the thing does not work? The chance for fraud is huge. Who would even allow this? The people pitching this must have been some very talented salespeople (perhaps they were convincingly able to argue that they were such huge Republican supporters that if they lost then that would be punishment enough, as it would be so very sad for them to see Obama win?)

I've worked with a lot of startups and clients and the staff always needs training and you never, ever know what all the bugs are until you've gotten some feedback from the staff who are using it for real. To suggest that a software project is done the day you first give it to the staff is idiotic -- that's simply the moment you move to real world testing.

Some developers might suggest that a really good suite of unit tests might provide enough insurance, but that is not true -- I've worked with non-technical staff who tend to confuse bad UI decisions with software bugs, and if a UI decision is bad enough, I think it is fair to classify it as a bug. If some_important_action is crucial to the staff, and none of the staff can find the link to some_important_action, then the UI decision that hid it is effectively as bad as a Fatal Exception, but no amount of unit tests can tell you that the staff finds the UI incomprehensible.

incision2• 14 years ago

>I wish I could land contracts like this one. Can you imagine building an app that the client will only need for 1 day, and you still get paid even if the thing does not work? The chance for fraud is huge. Who would even allow this? The people pitching this must have been some very talented salespeople...

Anecdotally, this is exactly how large consultancies, particularly those who specialize in serving the public sector, operate.

1) Deploy an army of "talented" salespeople to establish favorable executive-level relationships by exploiting every available loophole to provide trips, gifts, dinners and sporting events. Once the top has been won over, everyone below will fall in line.

2) Write contracts meeting the barest minimum interpretation of the requirements. Design them to specifically exploit uninformed procurement departments which are better equipped to source millions in copier paper or bolts than complex software.

3) Farm out any actual deliverable to the cheapest sub available nationwide. Ideally, you will have hidden travel and per diem for the talent in #2 leaving you free to fly in folks from the cheapest parts of the country.

4) Upon encountering any serious issue once work is underway simply scapegoat the current PM and shuffle in a new one.

5) Go to #1 employing the latest project as a reference that likely won't even be properly checked. In the event that diligence is performed, feed them to one of your friendly executives.

dennisgorelik• 14 years ago

That explains what I saw on one of my past projects, including replacing PM, travel&per diem, and presenting failed projects as a good reference.

TheCondor• 14 years ago

Was this a talented sales pitch or just your standard politics and an old boys club connection? No mention of the consulting company.. If it was my campaign, I'd hang them out to dry.

Seems the IT staff was out of their depth but there were some very serious and very fundamental issues if the users were confused as it sounds.

I say it as a joke but a barbed one: this guy thinks he was fit to manage a nation when he couldn't knock out a web app for 30000 users!?! Really?

gordonguthrie3• 14 years ago

And it is worse in the US because the client is the Romney organisation not the Republican Party - and it definately wont be around next time to learn the lesson.

SkyMarshal3• 14 years ago

>To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm.

Lawsuit incoming in 3...2...1...

I can't imagine the billionaires who funded the campaign and the various Super PACs are going to be pleased to find out Romney likely lost because of a failed GOTV effort.

jfc• 14 years ago

Except that there are several reasons Romney lost. The system crash may be one contributing factor, but it is far from the only reason his campaign was ultimately unsuccessful.

ams61102• 14 years ago

It's a stretch to think that a functioning mobile app on election day would have made the difference between Romney winning and losing. The election wasn't really that close. And I say that as someone who voted for him.

SkyMarshal3• 14 years ago

It's not a stretch to think that a functioning GOP GOTV campaign could have made the difference in 4 swing states that tipped the election to Obama (CO, FL, OH, VA), where the vote differential was just under 400,000.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/as-natio...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au5WjgbQnYrSdFd...

Romney had 37,000 field volunteers, plus phone bank. I don't know how many were in each of the four tipping point states, but had each of them been able to bring in between 10 and 20 voters who didn't vote (of the 2 million extra who voted for McCain in 2008 but were absent this year), Romney could have won.

Instead it sounds like due to the massive Orca failure, they all gave up and went home.

(and fwiw, I say this as someone who voted for Obama. Not sour grapes here, just assessing the IT project failure.)

gautamc• 14 years ago

Someone told me that Accenture build it in India - poetic justice, I'd think, if that was indeed true.

SkyMarshal3• 14 years ago

>"We asked if our laptops needed to be WiFi capable," Dittuobo told Ars. "Dan Centinello went into how the Garden had just finished expansion of its wireless network and that yes, WiFi was required. I was concerned about hacking, jamming the signal,* etc...*

This brings up a whole nother can of worms - electoral cyber warfare. What if the Dems, or some sympathizer group, say some local Anonymous, decided to disrup the GOP's centralized GOTV operation?

They could point LOIC at the IP receiving all the real-time field reports, set up hidden wireless jammers around Boston Garden, and any number of other hacks and exploits to disrupt this centralized system.

I use the GOP and Anonymous as an example here, but it could work in any direction. It's one thing for a campaign to lose due to its own incompetence and negligence, but quite another to lose due to outside interference and being the target of cyberwarefare.

shawndumas• 14 years ago

with one webserver they were their own worst enemy; no need to look elsewhere

eropple• 14 years ago

This is a great point, and it's one of the more frustrating things to encounter as a developer who knows more than just "the language I'm writing a website in". Security is not optional and security must be managed at every level of the infrastructural stack.

But that's hard, and nobody's going to know anyway, so let's just roll with it.

csel2• 14 years ago

If a hacker looks into their web and db infrastructure...I think he would just shake his head and move on.

gamble• 14 years ago

Politico's article on ORCA today claims that one of the major problems was that they deployed the system in their election night HQ just prior to the election, and the surge of legitimate traffic on election day triggered their DDOS defences. They'd never tested it in that location with realistic traffic levels.

rhizome7• 14 years ago

Deployed just prior: poor project management; late delivery.

DDOS defense: crashing

realistic traffic levels: more than the 3 ppl on the coding team

randomfool• 14 years ago

Or what if the ones implementing the system were the 'sympathizer group'. They wouldn't have to do any sort of jamming or anything, just give out insufficient instructions in how to use the system, incorrect passwords and make sure the system crashes a bunch.

Intercepting field reports? By the sounds of it, Team Obama had all the info they needed and this just opens the door to serious legal problems.

In general I haven't encountered too many Republicans in software development. Libertarians, yes. Republicans, no.

nhangen• 14 years ago

Coming from a launch that had its own share of issues, I can say that things like these happen for a variety of reasons:

1. Developers overestimate their capabilities 2. Developers underestimate timelines

3. Client overestimates developer throughput 4. Client underestimates man hours required for any given feature.

5. Someone expects someone else to do QA. 6. Project manager assigns everything an ASAP priority

And this is just to start.

xoail• 14 years ago

1. They should have hired best UX engineers for the design. 2. Hosted the solution in the cloud and called and made sure the host is aware of the upcoming traffic. 3. Rolled out the application in test mode at least a week before so that staff can do trail runs. 4. Worry less about hacking and made it easy to login (just via an ID) ~ me being Captain Hindsight.

acslater002• 14 years ago

I'm not so sure. Intentionally disruptive behavior by the opposition -- or even some motivated kid who wanted to cause trouble for the campaign -- would be one of my biggest concerns if I were designing this thing.

inpHilltr8r• 14 years ago

Faith based development.

Bud• 14 years ago

Perhaps Republicans should have spent more time actually displaying the business and organizational acumen and discipline that they claimed as an advantage over the Obama team, and less time suppressing the black vote.

Snark postscriptum: Also, next time, GOP, you might wanna hire some IT guys who make more than $12 an hour.

acdha6• 14 years ago

You don't even want to think how much more than $12/hour they paid. Big consulting companies are usually $200+ for fresh grads whose best work happens on PowerPoint slides

dscrd• 14 years ago

Perhaps he meant the guys who did the actual work.

pkulak• 14 years ago

We're all lucky that an organization too inept to manage a campaign is ultimately not allowed to manage the country.

csel2• 14 years ago

11 DB servers and 1 web app? Let's look at how the db was structured. Wait...nevermind forget it.

jongalloway2• 14 years ago

This is an absolutely perfect use case for cloud hosting like Azure - dev local, test on a few small instances, scale up as needed on election day, then shut it down. From the article it sounds like they paid for eleven servers, which was significantly more expensive and lower powered.

brown9-2• 14 years ago

This wouldn't have helped their training problem however - volunteers confused about how to find the site, not sure how to use it, etc.

Several dry runs and stress tests would have helped them alot.

antidoh2• 14 years ago

It's too bad the Romney campaign was unable to tap the services of an experienced businessman who is expert at management and delegation.

djt3• 14 years ago

i find it interesting that they named it Orca as Obamas system was called Narwhal.

for those of you that dont know, Narwhal is an animal, but its also a internet meme. Obviously a very nerdy reference by Obamas team.

The fact that the Romney team had to name their software as a killer for a Narwhal goes to show that they wanted to win at any cost, unfortunately when that happens you sometimes lose sight of the goal, which in this case is to have a working system.

jacalata• 14 years ago

I find it interesting that they made this exact point in the article we are discussing here, and you don't appear to have read it.

djt3• 14 years ago

they didnt mention that it was a animal made famous as a meme

pjscott2• 14 years ago

Or it means that whoever came up with the name was aware of Narwhal and thought it fitting that their system should also be named after a cool-looking whale. If this had not been a political issue, would you have been slower to reject this obvious innocent interpretation?

djt3• 14 years ago

they mentioned in the piece that it was named as an animal that is the only natural predator of the Narwhale.

Please read the article before you downvote or comment.

PakG1• 14 years ago

When I worked for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, it was pounded into our heads all the time that there was no second chance. Everything we did would get one chance only.

For that reason, we had two Technical Rehearsals. The purpose was to test both our systems and our procedures, and identify how they could be refined for the real thing. It was someone's job to actually design a huge number of expected and unexpected issues so that tech operations teams at each venue could be tested as to their response. Issues ranged from broken printers to network meltdowns to broadcasting failures, etc. We had two Technical Rehearsals for hopefully obvious reasons. And before the Technical Rehearsals, we also had the test events (i.e. world class but lower profile sporting competitions held at the Olympic venues to see whether we fell short in putting up a world class competition event).

We also had Disaster Rehearsals to test our disaster recovery systems and procedures, though I wasn't personally involved in those. I did get a string of text messages when it was happening though. "Primary datacentre flooding, starting emergency processes to switch to secondary datacentre now." etc. Never mind that nobody could ever believe that the primary datacentre could get flooded in a million years. The attitude was that any disaster was possible, and we had to prepare for the impossible.

If you have one shot only, and that shot is important, you need to have a large process committed to making sure that one shot goes well. And that process needs to be managed by someone experienced in that type of thing.

pyre• 14 years ago

Like the IBM "Black Team":

http://www.t3y.com/tangledwebs/07/tw0706.html

unreal372• 14 years ago

Ironic that Mitt Romney ran the Salt Lake City Olympic committee in light of this.

Also, the Ars article seemed to imply they wanted to keep how it worked a secret, so big testing like this would have tipped Obama what they were doing.

danso2• 14 years ago

In the past week, there's been discussion of how sophisticated the campaigns are at managing and leveraging the vast volumes of data they collect. I've argued that while they may have lots of data, and that they think they're being sophisticated with it, the results don't seem to indicate that they're particularly clever (or, more importantly, clever enough to be devious with it).

Having access to data is one thing...having the logistics and middle managers who have good insights is the other. I think it's safe to say that no matter how much money and resources these operations have, it doesn't mean anything without campaign operatives who have a real IT/data background.

runn1ng• 14 years ago

How effective these things actually are in US?

Why am I asking... I am in from Czech Republic, where I can't imagine anyone knocking door over door and asking people to vote. Actually, this behavior is so connected here to Jehova's Witnesses (yeah) that it would have only the negative effect.

Similarly, I can't imagine any candidate seriously considering calling random people and persuading them to vote. Again, this behaviour is so connected to annoying salesperson (most often mobile operators) that it would hurt the candidate.

And I don't think our democracy suffers because we don't have that in here.

fernly• 14 years ago

Our land-line telephone received at least six calls each day for two months, from political organizations representing candidates at the federal, state, and local levels. We never answer that phone, only let the answering machine take the call and return it in the very rare event it is someone "real". But we did not get calls on election day because we live in a state (CA) that both parties assumed (correctly) would give a majority to the President.

"Get out the vote" operations (GOTV) are real and sometimes effective in states where the outcome is expected to be close. In this election there were a small number of these "swing" states where both parties thought they had a chance to win.

In such states, if the early indications are that the voting is close, the party organization can redouble its efforts to contact known supporters (contributors, or merely people who are registered to that party in the public records, or people who have signed a petition or gotten on the party mailing list somehow) and persuade them to vote.

(This is because in the USA, unlike some countries, it is not mandatory to vote, and rarely do even half the eligible voters do so. So if you can persuade a person who was not planning to vote, to do so, that is a net gain of 1 vote.)

The purpose of this "Orca" system was to collate the reports from volunteers watching the polling places and identify precincts where a few extra votes might make a difference.

You can see how serious the effort was, in that the Republicans had mustered 37,000 volunteers willing to do this sort of thankless work: to stand around polling places, politely asking people how they had voted and phone in the counts; or, sit in an office and make telephone calls to people who do not want to be called and politely urge them to go and vote. That is a large effort, and apparently wasted by poor planning.

brazzy2• 14 years ago

There are very few countries where voting is mandatory, perhaps none. And still The USA has lower voter turnout than most, probably more because of the separate registration step than anything else.

But the biggest difference is the per-state first pas the post mechanism, which is what creates the phenomenon of "swing states" where relatively few voter decide everything, and almost any expense of effort by campaigns is worthwhile.

gordonguthrie3• 14 years ago

Historically intensive voter contact operations are only cultural acceptable in countries that weren't largely occupied by either the Fascists or the Communists.

So basically it is UK (less Northern Ireland), US, Canada, Australia and a few others. An Italian friend once said to me that if anyone knocked on his door asking how he voted he would stall them at the door, whilst trying to jump out the back window and get away over the hills...

mmonoceros• 14 years ago

Another misstep of the Romney camp seems relevant, since a lot of the discussion so far is about project management.

In September they admitted to wholesale copying of a key Obama fundraising page, with Zac Moffat blaming the issue on "junior staff confusion":

http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/romney-campaign-appears-...

The copy was lifted in its entirely. The similarity in the design is more subjective. (They were so similar that a lot of the discussion online speculated about a shared vendor -- which isn't the case. Quick Donate was a custom product internal to the Obama campaign.)

Romney campaign seems to have had serious problems in a lot of their internal processes when it came to tech/web. (AMERCIA)

b1daly• 14 years ago

I think there is a connection between the sort of hand-waving, know nothing-ism of Republican political messaging and this tech fiasco.

That kind of thing might work in the soft field of persuasion, but is pretty useless in creating a complex technical system. (By know nothing-ism of the Republicans, I'm referring to the birtherism, beligerent rhetoric about complicated diplomatic issues, anti-science views about global warming, trying to paint Obama as a socialist, in general the whole "Guns, God, & Gays" type of messaging).

irisshoor• 14 years ago

This is one area you don't want to hack a solution quickly, but want to use something that's been tried and tested in the field. You can be on the bleeding edge when you have time to iterate and fix things, not when you have just one shot. When it comes to having just one shot no one does it better than NASA - http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/9/3232160/curiosity-mastcam-2...

Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

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