Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential race to President Barack Obama and new evidence suggests that the Michigan native’s sophisticated poll-monitoring system may have cost him thousands of votes.

The poll-monitoring system, called Project ORCA, was designed to give the Romney campaign a technological advantage over the Obama campaign. According to CNET, the Romney campaign built ORCA to give them real-time voter information on election day, helping campaign operatives allocate resources (such as volunteers) in swing states likes Florida, Colorado, Ohio and Virginia.

“Project ORCA is a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election,” the Romney campaign said in a statement prior to the election. “It is estimated that Project ORCA will decipher 18 to 23 million people have voted by the time all voting has concluded.  This massive ‘sample size’ not only ensure the most accurate ballot projections ever, but it will also ensure hyper-accuracy of our supporter targeting as we work to turn them out to the polls.”

CNET reports that the plan on election day was for the Romney campaign to send 34,000 volunteers with an ORCA mobile web app to swing states . Nearly 1,000 staffers in TD Garden would direct “get-out-the-vote” efforts in swing states based on information submitted to the ORCA app.

“We are going to know more than the exit polls will be able tell us because we will know who voted in which precinct, and based on micro-targeting we know who that person likes,” Romney campaign communications director Gail Gitcho told NPR. “At 5 o’clock when the exit polls come out, I doubt we will pay attention to it because we will have had much more scientific information based on the political operation we have set up.”

While the Romney campaign had wanted the sophisticated poll-monitoring system to perform flawlessly, Project ORCA failed to live up to expectations.

“Early in the evening, one aide said that, as of 4 p.m., ORCA still projected a Romney victory of somewhere between 290 and 300 electoral votes.  Obviously that didn’t happen.  Later, another aide said ORCA had pretty much crashed in the heat of the action. ‘Somebody said Orca is lying on the beach with a harpoon in it,’ said the aide,” wrote Byron York of The Washington Examiner.

While it is highly unlikely that the failure of Project ORCA cost Mr. Romney the election, it probably cost the former Massachusetts governor thousands of votes.

A source within the Romney campaign, who worked on the Colorado team on election night, told Breitbart.com that hundreds (possibly more) volunteers weren’t able to use the mobile web app.

Even the Romney campaign’s digital director admitted that the app had never been properly tested.

“Was it flawless? No,” Zac Moffatt told ABC News. “Without a doubt, ORCA had its challenges.”

While no one knows exactly how many votes for Romney were lost due to the meltdown of Project ORCA, the Romney campaign is losing hundreds of Facebook friends every hour.

Mashable reports that 847 Facebook friends are leaving the Romney campaign’s official Facebook page every hour. The news outlet notes that more than 55,000 users have unliked the Bain Capital co-founder since 11:30 p.m. on election day.

President Obama, on the other hand, has gained more than 800,000 since being reelected to a second term as president of the United States.