The massive poll challenger effort by Mitt Romney’s campaign appears to have backfired in a big way. Not only were they caught teaching illegal tactics, it turns out that the electronic backbone of their operation was fundamentally broken.

To coordinate the effort to suppress Democratic voters while encouraging Republican votes, the Romney campaign hired the firms Targeted Victory, FLS Connect, and The Stevens and Schriefer Group, to build a massive database system for their poll challengers on the ground, named Orca. What happened next will be a shock to no one who observed how Mitt Romney does business.

These firms set up a networking system to, in theory, enable anyone with a smartphone to coordinate their efforts on the national level. They should have been able to have instant-by-instant updates on voter turnout, targeted districts, and shift assets as needed, to ensure that their votes would be counted while the opposition would be left behind.

The consultants set up the system but never performed even basic quality assurance testing on it. They never engaged in a stress test, that is, pushing the system to its limits to find out where it might break down; nor did they verify if their login system was working. In short, they did as consultants are apt to do: they minimized their costs in order to maximize their profits. This is corporate capitalism at work, the very thing Mitt Romney campaigned on.