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Team Romney: Actually Project ORCA Was Pretty Darn Successful

I am trying to ascertain just what level of self-delusion is required to make claims like this. My suspicion is that it involves padded rooms and needles. Let's take these one at a time.

But the Romney campaign is denying that there was any “massive failure” of Orca, although the campaign acknowledges the system was down for up to 90 minutes in the morning. Other than that one long outage, they say the system worked, albeit with minor glitches. Ultimately, the campaign had voting data from 91 percent of counties, said Romney digital director Zac Moffat

Okay, first I want to call attention to the deliberate use of weasel words here. They "had voting data from 91 percent of counties". For starters, notice he didn't say precincts. So, if a county has 30 precincts and 1 precinct reports data, then that counts as one of those "91% percent of counties". Second, notice he says they "reported data". That could mean someone entered in a couple voters at 9AM, then left for the day when the system crashed. The point of the project was to provide accurate real-time evolving data so lightning-fast evaluations could be made with regards to shifting campaign resources. Does that sound like that happened here? And spare me the "minor glitches" nonsense, Zac. There were widespread reported problems throughout the day before the entire system came crashing down. These are not "minor glitches"; this was a systematic and organizational failure that brought the entire GOTV effort of a United States Presidential campaign to a screeching halt.

Orca “has no relation to the outcome,” a Romney aide says.

If ORCA had no relation to outcome, then tell me, what the hell was the point of the project? Huge campaign resources were were committed to this project, both in dollars and time by donors and volunteers, and you're going to shrug your shoulders and claim it wasn't all that big a deal after all? This is insulting to everyone who took time out of their schedule or skimmed money from their ever-shrinking paycheck to put their trust in this operation.

“We achieved in a large part what we set out to do in the swing states in terms of our electorate."

Zac, you lost. And apparently, this came as a complete shock to everyone involved in the campaign. This is what you set out to achieve?

The reality is the President did what he said he was going to do. The Obama campaign said that they were going to increase turnout from 2008, and they were able to do that. And that had nothing to do with a reporting system on Election Day.

This is where the bridge to reality collapses under the weight of its own arrogance and incompetence. For the love of God man, Barack Obama banked roughly SIX MILLION LESS VOTES THAN 2008.

Please, if anyone at the RNC is listening, do not let these guys near a major political campaign ever again.

[Update]: BenK informs me that Allegheny County has 1,300 precincts. Tell me more about these fantastical stories of percentage of counties reporting.