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A few days before the presidential election, Mitt Romney’s campaign announced what it hoped would be its secret weapon at the polls. Dubbed Project Orca, it let volunteers use a web app to search for and mark off voters as they left the polling location, then collected the data to use in projections or check which Romney supporters might need a call. "When the exit polls come out, we won't pay attention to that," Communications Director Gail Gitcho told PBS. "We will have had much more scientific information just based on the political operation we have set up."

Project Orca was designed to replace the standard phone- and paper-based get-out-the-vote effort, creating a central system that could track voters and allocate volunteers in real time. In a statement to the...