“On the day after the election, complaints started pouring in from the volunteers themselves indicating that not only did Project Orca not improve the process, it may have actually hindered it. John Ekdahl, a volunteer who writes at Ace Of Spades HQ, outlined the various glitches and breakdowns of the system. Instead of handing out voter lists at local offices, volunteers were emailed 60 page PDF files and told to print them out at home the night before the election. They weren’t given official poll watcher certificates or told that those were required to enter most polling places. The “app” wasn’t really an app at all, it was a secure website, creating confusion for volunteers trying to find it in the iTunes store. It also didn’t auto-forward users who didn’t know to add an S to the http:// protocol in the app’s URL (which most browsers don’t ask you to type anymore), leaving numerous user lost on a broken webpage. Volunteers in other parts of the country shared similar complaints. The emailed packets came late or not at all. PINs that were required to login and download the voter lists didn’t work and couldn’t be reset. Calls and emails to the help desk went unanswered, and the entire system may have just completely crashed in the middle of election day. Frustrated volunteers struggled to get answers that never came, leaving most of them to fend for themselves or simply give up, wasting an entire day without bringing a single new voter to the voting booth.”

“Maybe worst of all, Romney’s plan invests no new ideas in the public school system. It transfers funds from public schools to privately run charter schools and goes the extra mile of diverting money from the public system to low-income parents for “supplemental tutoring or digital courses from state-approved private providers.” That’s right: school budgets will shrink so that the federal government can send checks to parents to hire private tutors and buy online courses for their children. This is a prescription for ending public education as we know it. While Romney hails charter schools for their “dramatically positive effects while working with some of the nation’s most disadvantaged students,” he derides public schools as “local education monopolies.”