Mitt Romney’s campaign boasted for the past two weeks that it would outgun President Barack Obama’s team in the Democrats’ area of strength — voter-targeting. It 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.

“In all the other testing we had, we didn’t have that issue,” Beeson said. “When you’re dealing with 34,000 people across the country, there’s going to be any number of issues, whether it’s user error or smart phone didn’t work. The system wasn’t perfect and we never claimed it would be. But as we go through cycles, this is the beginning of something that’s going to be very, very effective.”

In any case, Beeson said, the campaign had only a few months to assemble the turnout system: “You’re sort of building an airplane as you take off from the aircraft carrier.”

Romney digital director, Zac Moffatt — who did not oversee Project ORCA — conceded there were some problems but insisted the system generally worked.

“I’m not going to blow smoke,” he said. “I’m not saying there weren’t challenges.”

But he insisted that people were taking their own individual experiences and extrapolating that the entire system failed, when in fact it worked overall.

“A lot of data came into the system that we have on file now,” he said, although he couldn’t answer questions about whether it was continuous throughout the day or simply at the end. He insisted that 91 percent of all counties reported into the system, 14.3 million voters were accounted for as “voted,” and 5,397 reports of voting issues were reported, such as broken machines and a dearth of ballots.

“Look, we experienced challenges through it,” Moffatt said, but he insisted, “It allowed us to continue our GOTV efforts and allowed us at such a massive scale to track voting irregularities.”

Like where? “Florida, Ohio. We were seeing different things coming in through the alerts.”