One culprit appears to be “Orca,” the Romney’s massive technology effort, which failed completely. The usernames and passwords were wrong, but the reset password tool didn’t work, and we couldn’t change phone PINs. We were told the problems were limited and asked to project confidence, have people use pencil and paper, and try to submit again later. In one area, the head of the Republican Party plus 10 volunteers were all locked out. The system went down for a half hour during peak voting, but for hundreds or more, it never worked all day. I was immediately turned away because I didn't have my poll watcher certificate. I do not know if the system was totally broken, or if I just saw the worst of it. The problems with Orca appear to have been nationwide, and predated Election Day itself. 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. After signing up, you were invited to take part in nightly conference calls. The calls were more of the slick marketing speech type than helpful training sessions. There was a lot of “rah-rahs” and lofty talk about how this would change the ballgame. Working primarily as a web developer, I had some serious questions. Things like “Has this been stress tested?”, “Is there redundancy in place?” and “What steps have been taken to combat a coordinated DDOS attack or the like?”, among others. These types of questions were brushed aside (truth be told, they never took one of my questions). They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success. Attempts to communicate with the Romney campaign to ask for assistance were unsuccessful: 
 
 By 2PM, I had completely given up. I finally got ahold of someone at around 1PM and I never heard back. From what I understand, the entire system crashed at around 4PM. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I decided to wait for my wife to get home from work to vote, which meant going very late (around 6:15PM). Here’s the kicker, I never got a call to go out and vote. So, who the hell knows if that end of it was working either. Likewise, Twitchy recorded widespread real-time complaints and criticisms on Twitter by Project Orca volunteers. At one point during Election Day, the system had malfunctioned so badly that desperate volunteers wondered if the program had been hacked. The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Ekdahl concludes his account by hoping that the failures of Orca did not cost Romney the election: 
 
 We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity’s sake. Well, this is what they told us: 
 
 
 
 Project ORCA is a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election. Now, there seemed to be a fair amount of confusion about what they meant by "packet".
– Before election day, the Romney campaign was touting something it called "Project ORCA," an app that was supposed to revolutionize and digitize the GOP's get-out-the vote efforts. How did it work out? Well one volunteer who was using it—John Ekdahl from the Ace of Spades HQ—calls it a massive, possibly unprecedented failure. Basically, it was just a digitized version of the old tactic of watching polls to see if known Republicans have voted, and calling anyone who hasn't. But it was so poorly administered that it couldn't even accomplish that. Crucial information was never communicated, leaving Ekdahl unable to even watch the polls. Breitbart.com has a number of similar reports from other volunteers. The entire system wound up crashing for good at 4pm Eastern—Politico reports that the software had never even been tested before election day. Sources confirm that it crashed constantly, leaving Romney's team to watch public sources like CNN for data. One source likened it to landing a plane "without instruments."