Big Data's Role in Winning and Losing the Election
With the 2012 presidential election now a week behind us, it’s been widely documented that President Obama took full advantage of the benefits of a well-executed tech savvy campaign.
Unlike in 2008, the GOP fully embraced social media and campaign-based software this time around. But did their reliance on a big data app—and that app’s ultimate failure on election night—cost them the race?
“Project Orca” was to be a secret weapon of sorts, an election night tool that would help campaign volunteers know which Romney supporters had voted and which ones had not. Those that hadn’t could then receive a call, letting them know how crucial their vote was.
Romney campaign director Gail Gitcho hyped up the app’s power only days before election day, touting the unprecedented software technology that the GOP would be employing.
Zac Moffatt, the Romney campaign’s digital director, recently disputed that the web-based app failed and reservedly stated that it was “relatively successful.” With the loss of the election—one that many believed would have a far closer outcome—others disagreed with those remarks and were quick to voice their displeasure on the web.
On election day, the app seemingly never had a chance. Hundreds of Romney volunteers experienced trouble while logging in to the system, trying to reset passwords—and some couldn’t even find the site. Before long, help lines became swamped with frustrated users, the site eventually crashed due to high traffic, and the result took on the appearance of a DDoS attack.
So what caused Orca to sink?
InfoWorld points out that John Ekdahl, Jr., a Romney supporter and web developer, summarized Orca’s demise in a “devastating blog post.” Even the Romney supporter Ekdahl marveled at the bungling from top to bottom, starting with the failure to educate volunteers on even where to find Orca (many went looking in the Android and iTunes marketplaces even though Orca was web based) and down to poor testing of the software as a whole.
Some Romney supporters have even speculated that the app was hacked, although there is little proof to back up this claim. The majority of people believe the app simply failed under the deluge of data that Orca quickly collected in the single day and made live to users.
Adi Robertson of The Verge remarks that, while big data is obviously vital to a successful campaign in this day and age, “collecting it successfully requires a focus on actual humans and a lot of stress testing.”
Neither of these two things seems to have been included in Orca’s scope.
