Conservative bloggers have arrived at the "anger" stage of grieving, going so far as to accuse contract developers of sabotaging the Mitt Romney campaign's "get out the vote" efforts. But Romney campaign Digital Director Zac Moffatt told Ars that Project Orca was relatively successful—and that it was not a determining factor in Romney's election-night loss.

Project Orca was a Web-based app developed to help the Romney campaign track which supporters had voted and to help poll watchers report any potential voter suppression, fraud, or other irregularities back to the campaign for follow-up by its legal team. Volunteers at polls across the country were to access Orca from their smartphones and feed all data back to the main Romney campaign site inside the Boston Garden. But, as we reported, Orca caused widespread frustration after user credentials were issued improperly. At one point during election day, Comcast cut off inbound traffic to Orca's servers because it was mistaken for a denial of service attack. And even while the system was working, the high volume of data being sent to the server caused such slow response that it appeared to some users that the system had crashed.

Here's how Moffatt described the problems a few days ago to CNET: "The primary issue was we beta-tested in a different environment than the Garden [Boston Garden, where the 800 campaign staffers were working]. There was so much data coming in—1200 records or more per minute—it shut down the system for a time. Users were frustrated by lag, and some people dropped off and we experienced attrition as a result."

When I spoke with him today, Moffatt didn't call Orca a success, and he acknowledged frustration with the system. But he also insisted things weren't quite as dire as some accounts from frustrated volunteers suggested. "I can tell you that data from 91 percent of counties in the targeted states came in," Moffatt said, "and that we had 14.5 million people who were marked as having voted. And there were 4,397 reports of incidents that we were able to pass to our legal department."

A compressed schedule played a role in Orca's difficulties, but there were other factors. While it tapped into data collected by the Web and mobile efforts of Moffatt's digital campaign operations, a separate team developed Orca. According to multiple sources familiar with Orca, the project was overseen by Romney campaign Director of Voter Contact Dan Centinello and did not involve developers working for Moffatt's operations, such as devs from Targeted Victory—the company co-founded by Moffatt—and from mobile developer Rockfish Interactive. Moffatt said he didn't even see the Orca project's code until it went live on election day.

Listen all y'all, this is sabotage?

"For whatever reasons, the conservative bloggers have latched onto Orca as the reason it all fell apart," Moffatt added. Those bloggers have suggested that developers with Democratic sympathies somehow acted as a fifth column within the Romney camp. Targeted Victory was singled out by some bloggers because a few of its developers worked for Al Gore in the past.

"Why do they have Al Gore's dev working on Romney's social media development?!" blogger Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick asked. "Truly, how can they expect dedication?" She also singled out another developer who is African-American and "who has a 96 percent chance of being an Obama voter… I will be accused of 'racism' for even flagging. But it's the truth."

Moffatt said that this kind of thinking puts too much faith in a single piece of software. "Anyone who knows campaigns knows this was all baked in before that day—there was no magic, Orca wasn't a silver bullet," he said. "But on the flip side, when you're on a campaign that has only six months of infrastructure time, sometimes you have to throw a Hail Mary. It's really hard to go up against someone who has four years of lead time."

As far as Orca drawing away volunteers who could have been involved in less high-tech get-out-the-vote efforts, Moffatt also disagreed with the bloggers. "Some people are saying if those 37,000 people went out and each brought 20 more voters to the polls, it would have changed the result," he said. "But that would assume we knew the 20 people who weren't going out and voting."

What about the decision to outsource Orca instead of assigning it to a group like Targeted Victory? Moffatt says that too was the right decision. "We don't build things like that; we're not a firm that would build it," he said. "If we had built it, it would have broken—we know our limitations." Nor was Orca a good fit for the other companies that the Romney campaign relied on for voter engagement apps and Web development.

Ars attempted to contact members of the Orca development team for further comment through various channels, without success.