On the homepage, Maggie and I do a deep dive into Mitt Romney's hugely hyped GOTV-tracking program and its meltdown on Election Day

Mitt Romney’s campaign boasted for the last two weeks that they would outgun President Barack Obama’s team in the Democrats’ area of strength – voter-targeting. They would use a state-of-the-art system called ORCA, named for the killer whale, that cost substantial resources to build over months.

Instead, Romney campaign officials were mostly flying without instruments on election day.

Numerous Republicans in and around the Romney campaign called the ORCA platform a total bust, stranding thousands of volunteers without a way of reporting data back to headquarters and leaving Romney central command without a clear view of developments on the ground.

The system was not shared with officials outside a small group in Boston, and was kept largely a secret until the immediate lead-up to election day. The system was beta-tested on its own but not within technical infrastructure of the Boston TD Garden, where the Romney campaign’s massive War Room was set up. That accounted for a number of the problems, officials conceded, even as they protested to POLITICO the depth of the Election Day meltdown

Three sources described the campaign to POLITICO as “flying blind” on Tuesday in terms of targeting, with ORCA – which had a pricetag of hundreds of thousands of dollars – failing. There was another sizable allocation of funds for emergency robocalls to goose turnout late in the day in key areas identified by ORCA, but those were never put to widespread use.

Romney political director Rich Beeson defended ORCA as a first step toward a larger-scale voter turnout system that the GOP needs to develop, telling POLITICO that the data flow was imperfect but still significant.

“Did it work perfectly? No. But did we get a hell of a lot of good data? Yes,” Beeson said. “When I needed answers, I could get them.”

One of the problems, Beeson said, was that ORCA was never tested in the context of the TD Garden. When so much data started flowing into the facility, it was perceived to be a hack and rejected, Beeson said. ...

One Republican source with close ties to the operation said the system essentially appeared to have crashed on the first wave of information coming in, and never managed to get started again. It was down throughout the day, and while it may have been gathering numbers, it never provided the output in terms of target guidance it was supposed to, said a source.

“The problem is not only that it doesn’t work on election day,” said the source. “The problem is, you divert an enormous amount of human and financial resources over many months to [building this]. So that means they’re not doing anything else for turnout.”

Several Romney backers stressed that, based on the outcome on Nov. 6, this system breakdown was not the reason they lost. But it was a striking meltdown of a project the campaign heralded as a key ingredient to success.

One Republican who helped operate the system from Boston on Election Day called it a near-complete “failure” and an “amateur operation.” Throughout the morning, volunteers in the states called frantically back to headquarters to alert campaign officials to ORCA’s deficiencies: users’ login information and data entry failed and a backup phone system locked out many campaign workers and failed to confirm that information from others had been received. Cries for help from the campaign help desk went more or less unanswered.

Read more about: Mitt Romney, 2012 Elections