Romney's fail whale: ORCA the vote-tracker left team 'flying blind' (Updated)

Over at Aces of Spades HQ, a Mitt Romney Election Day worker details the massive failure of the ORCA Project, the campaign-designed voter-tracking app that was supposed to rival the Obama campaign's ground-game efforts:

It would take a lot of planning, training and coordination to be done successfully (oh, we'll get to that in a second). This wasn't really the GOP's effort, it was Team Romney's. And perhaps "unprecedented" would fit if we're discussing failure. 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. It's worked for years. From the very start there were warning signs...

Do click the link for the full Ace of Spades account.

But it was described as a mega-app for smartphones that would link the more than 30,000 operatives and volunteers involved in get-out-the-vote efforts. PBS profiled it a few days before the election. The app was created and managed by the Romney campaign and was kept a secret among a close circle in Boston, according to POLITICO sources. It was supposed to be incredibly efficient and allow the campaign to streamline, from its War Room at the Garden in Boston, the efforts to maximize turnout of Romney backers.

State officials were kept in the dark about exactly how it would work in the lead-up to Election Day, and there was never a dry run that included early voting, said one of the sources.

Among other issues, the system was never beta-tested or checked for functionality in the Boston TD Garden, where it would be used, without going live before Election Day, two sources said. It went live that morning but was never checked for bugs or efficiencies internally. The volunteer at Ace of Spades also cited this issue but as one by which field workers couldn't get to know the system ahead of Election Day. But inside Romneyland, officials were experiencing similar problems as votes were being cast.

In other words, it was not the field element that was the problem, it was the machine that was supposed to be coordinating everything and churning through data to allow the teams to make precision efforts. Instead, as one source said, it was like landing a plane "without instruments."

Campaign aides insisted to reporters throughout the day that reports across Twitter that ORCA was problem-plagued were wrong.

It's been reported the system crashed at 4 p.m., but multiple sources familiar with the war room operation said it had actually been crashing throughout the day. Officials mostly got information about votes either from public news sources tracking data, like CNN.com, or by calling the counties for information, the source said. Officials insisted the day after the election that they had still believed they were close, and that they had hit their numbers where they needed to, even as Fox News and other outlets called the race.

The numbers in the interface never moved, leaving officials in Boston and out in the states "flying blind" — a phrase used by several people. The workers on the ground didn't know what doors to knock on or what efforts to make with which voter targets who had not yet turned out — some efforts were made but they were slow and more cumbersome. And the campaign officials also generally didn't know which precincts to send auto-calls into to try to boost turnout — especially in precincts in Ohio, where there is no party affiliation in the general election. Instead of targeted information, all they really had to work with was the generic raw vote tallies in various counties.

"The whole point of this system was we were supposed to be able to identify who in these precincts had not turned out, who were our supporters," said one source of the system, which was built at a "substantial" cost. The idea behind it was to use pre-canned, targeted messages to push the voters who hadn't yet cast a ballot, one of the most basic aspects of Election Day GOTV, which is knowing which supporters have already voted and who still needs to be part of a pull operation.

Romney spokespeople didn't respond to an email for comment.

*This post has been updated

Maggie Haberman is senior political reporter for Politico.