Talk:ORCA (computer system)

Things to add

too tired to continue. please add [1]: it was calculated that romney wold have won if each of the 37,000 volunteers had brought in 20 voters. And one 2008 obama campaign director doubts that it could make a difference so late in the campaign. --Enric Naval (talk) 17:56, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

• Such speculation is not encyclopedic. One would have to have a secondary source that said that each volunteer would have got 20 people to the polls (which is high) with the app, and none without it, or 20 more people to the polls with the app. In any case, the app was supposed to track who had voted, to reduce duplicating effort, not "get people to the polls". 173.66.111.59 (talk) 20:08, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

• Ufff, the voters were tracked for the purpose of mobilizing the ones who hadn't voted..... --Enric Naval (talk) 20:37, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

• Yes yes, but the language is less important that the fact that the source is starting out with the number of votes that Romney lost by, and then dividing by the number of Project Orca volunteers to obtain a figure for how many additional voters each volunteer would have to identify and then bring to the polls. The source is not saying that each Project Orca volunteers was expected to bring 20 voters to the polls and that the failure of the app prevented them from doing so. 173.66.111.59 (talk) 04:29, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Details from Ars Technica article

I added some details from the following reference:

• Gallagher, Sean (Nov 9, 2012). "Inside Team Romney's whale of an IT meltdown". Ars Technica.

Please see if I summarized the source accurately. If you're interested, there are more details in that article that could be incorporated into the article. 67.101.5.157 (talk) 09:33, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

A problematic source

If this source hadn't been a post in a blog, it would be a slam-dunk for use in this article. Not only is it cited in many accounts of Project Orca, it is a first-hand account of using (or being unable to use) Orca. I'm mentioning it here no only for someone with more interest in Wikipedia to evaluate & defend its use in this article, but as a help to users of Wikipedia who are capable of going beyond what it offers. -- llywrch (talk) 00:48, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

• Feel free to use general information from this blog post and see if anybody asks for a better source. I wouldn't use his personal experiences, but I doubt anyone would object to paraphrasing general information such as "The entire purpose of this project was to digitize the decades-old practice of strike lists. The old way was to sit with your paper and mark off people that have voted and every hour or so, someone from the campaign would come get your list and take it back to local headquarters. Then, they'd begin contacting people that hadn't voted yet and encourage them to head to the polls." 173.66.111.59 (talk) 04:36, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

• I notice that you're now objecting to using Ekdahl at all [2]. It's not a "primary source"; if you look at the sources, they are all reliable secondary sources that quote Ekdahl's account. The use of the {{Primary sources}} tag is therefore erroneous and I've removed it. I've also removed the {{Over-quotation}} tag that you added - I've done some more paraphrasing but the remaining quotes are essential (1) to document what the Romney campaign said about the system and (2) to convey the accounts of the system's users. Prioryman (talk) 08:17, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

• Yes, secondary sources can use any primary sources as sources of information, and then we cite the secondary source. It seems that the overquotation has been fixed; I have read the article again and I can't spot quotes that can be replaced by paraphrasing without losing usefulness to the readers. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:44, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Significance?

I really feel like this article is overly long and dependent on just a few sources. Contrast to Project Narwhal, the Obama campaign's program. Narwhal is much more significant than ORCA, both in scope and scale, but ORCA's article is much much longer. Perhaps someone should go through and rewrite the article to make it far more concise (and a bit less credulous of the primary sources?) 66.180.186.215 (talk) 19:30, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Or alternatively expand the Narwhal article to a similar comprehensiveness, which should be possible. I'll have a look at doing that as a kind of sister article. Prioryman (talk) 08:31, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

I'll just leave this here.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/11/17/anonymous-saved-the-election-text/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.45.42.125 (talk) 06:41, 18 November 2012 (UTC) The Anonymous story is very relevant and the potential for ORCA to have been a voting fraud instrument is signficant. Please follow up in the best encyclopedic manner!!Cyranorox (talk) 16:38, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes, the allegation that Project Orca involved a vote-flipping component deserves mention in the article, especially as it seems to be a repeat of the 2004 Ohio vote flipping, via a strategy of redirecting the vote tally servers to a Karl Rove server operation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 167.191.42.7 (talk) 01:58, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Can someone add in some details on the team that was involved in project Orca - plenty of videos online - PBS interviews with Gail Gitcho and others...

Can someone add in the team that was involved in project Orca - plenty of videos online - PBS interviews with Gail Gitcho and others...

It would be good to get their views on the current 2016 campaigns, and what went wrong and what went right in 2014, for example.