Recent US elections showed the folly of relying on technology. Mitt Romney’s campaign had hatched a highly secret weapon to track and control voting pattern on the election day.
In the week leading up to the election, Romney campaign spokesperson Andrea Saul told Business Insider that ORCA was ”the Republican Party’s newest, most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 election,” touting it as the game-changer that would blow even the Obama campaign’s sophisticated GOTV system out of the water.
Urging the electorate Go To Vote(GOTV) is one thing and to let technology take over the command is yet another. The folly of relying on technology to replace the age old human social interactions is no more starkly illustrated than in this occasion. Romney who hoped to change the political landscape showed his hand here.
“Their priorities were so screwed up — [they were] hypersensitive about information security, but also wanted to use the best technology they could,” the strategist continued. “In the end they got neither. They put out a laughable GOTV product.”
As a result there ensued a massive organizational failure that resulted in lower Republican turnout than even John McCain got in 2008.
A major source of Romney’s GOTV problems appears to have been the disastrous Project ORCA, an expensive technological undertaking that was supposed to provide the campaign with real-time poll monitoring that would allow Republicans to target GOTV efforts on Election Day.
To quote the Business Insider,:
It appears that in its singular focus on competing technologically with the Obama campaign, the Romney team neglected to adequately account for and organize the essential human element necessary to any grassroots undertaking. Thus when its technological efforts failed, the campaign was left without a Plan B, and its volunteers were forced to fly blind at the moment the campaign needed them most.
“I think sometimes people get enamored of technology and they take people out of the mixture because its easier,” Republican strategist Dave Carney told Business Insider.
When we equate progress with our advances in technology we ought to remember we cannot leave the essential component of building up interpersonal relationships to an impersonal program or technology in its narrowest sense. Reading sometime ago of corporate heads firing employees through emails made me think how far we had fallen short from the true objective of progress.
Progress as the fellow said, is a human thing and it ought not let technology rob its sweetness.
(Insiders Explain How Mitt Romney’s Campaign Completely Fell Apart On Election Day
By Grace Wyler | Business Insider of Nove.12,2012)
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