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I don't buy all this stuff about consultants just profiteering off the Romney campaign. The last Gallup poll before the hurricane had Romney with a 5 point lead among likely voters. This poll was not part of a "con game". Rasmussen's last poll had the election close to tied in the popular vote. Something unusual and unexpected happened on election day that the pollsters absolutely did not expect to see, and I don't buy the argument that the election was stolen through vote fraud. Obama won by large margins in several of the swing states that were supposed to be very close, and he won by too many votes to explain that by fraud. It seems like the entire science and art of polling needs to be re-examined and revised by firms like Gallup and Rasmussen. They missed something big in this election and so did Romney's consultants.

In fairness to the Romney campaign (and speaking as a software developer), I’m sure they ran a very large number of tests on the Orca system. Clearly they needed to run even more tests. But it’s difficult to simulate the number of simultaneous users that you have on election day and there’s no possible way to simulate all the possible technical and user-related problems that can occur on election day. My take on this is that the GOP needs to use a simpler and less-sophisticated system next time that doesn’t rely so much on real-time data from field operatives with smart phones, but just gets the basic job done and enables volunteers to contact all the likely GOP voters.

The last Gallup poll before the hurricane had Romney with a 5 point lead among likely voters

The likely voter model was wrong. The Democrats were able get a lot of new and unlikely voters to the polls on Election Day. Pretty much all the polls of registered voters had Obama leading.

Obama campaign knows how to do one thing well. Get massive numbers from blue centers. Most democrats self-pack. We know that. They know that. If you compare county maps from 2008 to 2012, it's clear Romney did better. However, those massive democrat areas got the vote out bigtime. Knock and drag.

I think pollsters underestimated Detroit (And similar) turnout.