My considerable experience with computer projects -- it has been
my 'profession' for going on 50 years -- leads me to believe that
deliberate sabotage is usually easy to detect and remedy, but such
classic screwups as overconfidence, bad planning, failure to inform,
failure to document, and above all failure to test, all of which
were noted in reports of difficulties with Orca, are endemic to the
craft, especially when a 'business' (boosterist) mentality is
brought to bear on its practitioners by the people who write their
paychecks. Everything I heard sounded exactly like the many, many
project failures I had witnessed and heard about over the years.
The disease seems to be incurable; the same mistakes, grand, petty
and in between, are made over and over again. Perhaps they are
coded in the human genome. In fact I have heard that the Democrats
had the same sort of problems with their similar system four years
ago; the reason it was not noised about more was only that
apparently there was less boasting about it beforehand.
I am not sure why these computer systems beat the ancient
technology of precinct captains with ordinary checklists of
voters.
My experiences also cause me to doubt Anonymous's story. One
might conceal a hacking operation within another, larger
project, but it's pretty risky. It would be smarter to have
the whole thing entirely concealed and completely separate
from everything else, in which case it would be very difficult
to detect until the last moment, if at all. A lot more
information will have to come out of the events before one can
judge whether anything like that happened, anyway.