After numerous articles criticized the Romney campaign’s “Orca” project as an IT meltdown, the digital director of the campaign pushed back and said that the system mostly succeeded in recording votes and irregularities.

Orca was supposed to be the Romney team’s “killer app” on election day. Ideally, it was supposed to help 37,000 die-hard volunteers in swing states keep tabs on polling places, report voting trends on the ground, and let the campaign know of any funny businesses happened at any polling sites. These volunteers would use a mobile app to help them keep in touch with 800 volunteers back at the Romney HQ in Boston. If everything worked according to plan, the campaign would have actionable information about which counties to target in the middle of election day.

“This has never been done before — it’s kind of a brand new model,” Romney communications director Gail Gitcho told PBS on Nov. 5. “The Obama campaign likes to brag about their ground operation but it’s nothing compared to this.”

But numerous Orca volunteers complained that their passwords didn’t work, that they didn’t know to use the “https://” prefix to access the Orca site, and that the Orca site crashed often throughout the day. This indicates Orca wasn’t tested under real-world conditions before election day, a serious flaw in what was supposed to be a “state-of-the-art” system.

However, Romney digital director Zac Moffatt said Orca mostly succeeded in its aims. He said that 14.2 million voters and 5,397 polling irregularities were recorded on the system. He noted that data were reported from 91 percent of the counties where volunteers were stationed.

“I understand the frustrations over interruptions with so many people engaged,” Moffatt told the Washington Post. “But I have real numbers. … I’m very surprised, as digital guy, about the pushback people are getting. This didn’t materially change the course of the election.”

Regardless of Moffatt’s assessment that Orca mostly worked, it clearly didn’t have enough of an effect on the final turnout on election day to make it a close race.

Whale seat via F6-12/DevinatArt

It’s Election Day in America and citizens everywhere are proudly telling their friends, and anyone online who will listen, that they voted. In an attempt to measure the action and encourage more people to vote, Facebook is today promoting a message atop U.S. members’ News Feeds and asking them to click an “I’m Voting” button, and tracking these special status updates in real-time.

The social network set up its version of an Election Day headquarters with a live heat map that displays, in aggregate, where people are voting around the country. According to Facebook, “the map displays bursts of activity as people share that they’re voting,” with the size of each burst correlating with the number of people voting in a particular region.

Facebook’s voting page also highlights votes per hour, the number of men and woman voters, and voters by age. Interestingly enough, at the time of this story, female voters outnumbered male voters by a near 2:1 ratio, and the most active demographic is the 25 to 34-year-old group.

The tool is part of Facebook’s commitment to encourage its members to vote, the company said in a note posted to its U.S. Politics Page. Along with the “I’m voting” prompt, Facebook is also once again helping members locate their polling location, an action the company believes will get more people to the polls.

According to a study by the University of California, San Diego, Facebook’s messaging efforts helped encouraged roughly 333,000 more people to vote during the 2010 midterm elections. More than 12 million people clicked the Facebook vote button during that election.

Facebook isn’t the only social network working around the clock on Election Day to tally status updates. Twitter and Topsy partnered to do a little more heavy-lifting and determine the sentiment behind all tweets related to the U.S. presidential election. You can use the Twindex tool to follow the mood of the nation live on Twitter today.

Photo credit: voteprime/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Ask and you shall receive. A simple letter sent by the New York Tech Meetup to President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney got the candidates to discuss their policies around startups and the technology community at large.

The meetup group, which has a membership of 27,000 people and was created by Meetup.com founder Scott Heiferman in 2004, sent a letter to both candidates requesting an explanation of their policies affecting the startup community. Both candidates responded in a timely fashion, and the group posted the letters for its members to read, as first spotted by The Next Web.

In the letters, Obama and Romney talked up their appreciation for entrepreneurs and the technology sector’s ability to create new jobs.

The president noted that he launched the Startup America Partnership and signed the JOBS Act into law to make it possible for more people to invest in startups. He also promised to protect the “openness of the Internet while still enforcing intellectual property rights.”

Obama placed the strongest emphasis on his startup visa program and other initiatives, such as recruiting teachers and training specialized workers, designed to develop more talent in the U.S.

“Investments in human capital remain our strongest economic asset,” he said. “We can’t simply cut our way to prosperity or fall back to the top-down, trickle-down economics that benefits the few, but guts investments in our country’s future that grow our economy — and your startups,” he added, a clear insult of his opponent’s attitudes.

Romney, meanwhile, outlined an economic plan involving raising the visa caps for skilled foreign workers, a corporate tax reduction to 25 percent, taking action against nations like China that steal American intellectual property, educational reform, and an investment in research.

“As president, I will focus government resources on research programs that advance the development of knowledge, and on technology with widespread application and potential to serve as the foundation for private section innovation and commercialization.”

Romney too took a shot at his opponent. “Many of these policies may seem like common sense, yet they are ones that our nation is failing to pursue today and ones that our President has put on the back burner while trying his own hand at playing venture capitalist and focusing on government-led growth.”

Photo credit: Gruenemann/Flickr

Not to be outdone by Twitter, Facebook has partnered with CNN to create a digital home where the politically curious can follow the buzz surrounding the candidates in the 2012 presidential election.

“Election Insights,” as the destination site is called, visualizes the volume of Facebook activity involving Democratic candidates President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his veep choice, Paul Ryan.

Visitors can find a line graph showing the volume of activity, color-coded for each candidate, spanning various time periods, and can segment data by state, gender, and age group.

CNN will use the tool in its presidential election coverage, Facebook said.

Twitter, as you may recall, is also attempting to measure the mood of the nation in the run-up to election day. In early August, the information network, which has called this year’s election the “Twitter election,” released a political index that pivots on Twitter data.

Both Twitter and Facebook have a continued interest in being seen as the primary source of public discourse; this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the companies’ put forth overlapping strategies around major events. Most recently, the companies attempted to establish their respective networks as the home of Olympic Games athletes, conversations, and pictures.

Ballot box image via Shutterstock

Twitter is turning to you and the stream-of-consciousness feelings you express on the presidential candidates to concoct a political poll of a different kind.

Dubbed the Twitter Political Index, the alternative polling tool is the information network’s way of quantifing the Twittersphere’s perception of the presidential candidates in a meaningful way.

Tweets mentioning Barack Obama or Mitt Romney are weighed against all other tweets on a daily basis, and each candidate is assigned a sentiment score to reflect the day’s conversations. The index also shows the fluctuation in scores over time.

“A score of 73 for a candidate indicates that Tweets containing their name or account name are on average more positive than 73 percent of all Tweets,” explained Adam Sharp, Twitter’s head of government, news, and social innovation.

Twitter desires its index to augment traditional polling mechanisms, not replace them, and provide additional insight into the attitude of the nation, Sharp said.

The Twitter Political Index updates each day after 8 p.m. Eastern. It’s powered by data analysis company Topsy and long-standing polling firms The Mellman Group and North Start Opinion Research. USA Today will also use the index as part of its election meter.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Stitcher, the iOS and Android radio app that is trying improve the state of non-music streaming content, has added an Election Center section to its app to keep people in the loop on the contentious 2012 U.S. elections.

Stitcher’s in-app programming already includes high-profile shows like NPR’s Fresh Air, Rush Limbaugh, CNN News, Chelsea Lately, Marc Maron, and Fox Sports. But now the application will have a section dedicated purely to the election that can keep political watchers up-to-the-minute with news and updates. News and updates will mostly come from media outlets, but there’s also a section for candidates themselves.

Notably, only the Obama campaign has signed up to issue direct updates. That said, the Romney campaign’s messages and updates will be coming soon, according to Colin Billings, Stitcher’s Director of Product.

Billings said this update shows the direction Stitcher will take in quest to make audio programming better. He said the app only offers on-demand streaming now, but the company is working on a way to let people save content for later listening, for when they don’t have access to wireless data or want to conserve battery.

“We’re trying to innovate the radio and audio space and evolve the medium,” Billings told us.

San Francisco-based Stitcher has raised about $20 million to date, with its last round totaling $10 million. Investors include New Enterprise Associates, Benchmark Capital, New Atlantic Ventures, and Ron Conway.

Take a better look at the new Election Center below:

Pres. Obama photo: Becky Fiedler/Flickr

There’s no doubt that social media will play an important role in the 2012 elections, just as it did in both 2008 and 2010. But as its influence grows, so do the amount of spammers using social channels to unethically sway voters.

A new infographic from anti-spam company Impermium shows just how bad social spam has gotten already on Facebook, Twitter, and more with the ongoing 2012 Republican primary. The company estimates that 85 percent of readers on major news networks have been exposed to political spam through social user comments this year.

The culprits behind this political social spam? They’re actually the same guys who send you spam e-mails for Viagra and winning some magical lottery. Impermium says it compared IP addresses and other clues, and it found several matches between political and common spammers.

Although election spam so far has been mostly focused on the GOP primary candidates, Impermium predicts that spam attacks will affect candidates of all parties as the fall general election heats up.

“Our concern is not that political organizations are tapping the power of social networks to get out the vote,” CEO of Impermium Mark Risher said, in a statement. “The challenge is that social media, if leveraged by unethical groups, could be highly effective in coercing voters, and when combined with the criminal spam techniques we observed, could have a devastating impact.”

Check out the full infographic below:

American flag photo: Alex Staroseltsev/Shutterstock

Want to know what to expect in the New Hampshire primary this coming week?

Here’s a nicely curated, Internet-powered playlist of links that will take you step-by-step through the Republican race to date, including info on each candidate, news items, speech videos, and cold, hard stats.

Best of all, you’ll get most of the news you probably wanted to read from reliable sources and mainstream media outlets while dodging some of the, uh, santorum you might have to wade through in a typical Google News search for information on the primary.

Check it out:

Click to see full widget. Although the widget is ordinarily embeddable, it’s not playing nicely with our WordPress install. We apologize for the inconvenience.

This handy playlist comes from MentorMob, a fairly freshly minted startup based in Chicago.

The company launched its first public product just two months ago. The goal of these playlists, a company spokesperson tells us, is to “organize the best content on the web … so users can educate themselves on topics of their liking.”

For example, this New Hampshire-themed playlist was created to help web-surfing voters get all the relevant information about the Republican race as it meanders toward the upcoming primary, including data “about each candidate’s goals and platforms in an unbiased fashion — that way anyone can comprehend the event and its participants in simplest terms,” the rep concluded.

Co-founder Kris Chinosorn has said he wants MentorMob to be “the Pandora of learning.” In many ways, the product reminds us of webrings (remember the nineties?!), but with a handy navigational sidebar to keep you from falling into the bowels of the Internet.

And for use cases like this one (or for guiding students through a selection of Wikipedia articles and published research, or for any similar instance where guided curation is needed), MentorMob seems like a decent solution.

Here’s more about MentorMob from its team:

As the country prepares for a hot presidential race later this fall, the web is flooded with news, videos and events related to our collective political goings-on. Google.com/Elections organizes information for voters, politicians and journalists all in one centralized dashboard.

“There’s no question that the Internet is set to deliver more political information, opinion and news than any other medium throughout the 2012 U.S. elections,” writes Googler Eric Hysen on the company blog.

Hysen says the new portal is “an election hub where citizens can study, watch, discuss, learn about, participate in and perhaps even make an impact on the digital campaign trail.”

Each person in the race has his or her own page in the hub. On each individual’s page, you can see news items and videos as they become available.

Those who want a fix of real-time stats can check out the Trends section of the hub, which shows searches by volume for each candidate as well as YouTube views and mentions in Google News stories. If you click the “Play” button in the top left corner of the page, you can even see how each trend played out over time.

Trends can be viewed by day, week or month and also by state. Each particular trend for a particular candidate can be expanded to show more detail.

YouTube.com/Politics brings its own variety of data. This section of Google’s video site shows the top five politics-focused clips from each month as well as a sweet-looking graph showing how each of the candidates compares in terms of video views.

Google’s hub also has a Maps-powered section called On the Ground, which shows news events as they happen on a timeline and on a map. For now, the map centers on Iowa, where the first Republican caucuses will take place tomorrow, January 3, 2012.

As more and more barometers of success pop up on the web, we have increasingly democratic tools for parsing our candidates’ popularity. Google’s Elections hub is just one more way of tracking who is winning Americans’ hearts and minds, but who will win the Republican primary — and the presidential election — is still anyone’s guess.