Our land-line telephone received at least six calls each day for two months, from political organizations representing candidates at the federal, state, and loc

Our land-line telephone received at least six calls each day for two months, from political organizations representing candidates at the federal, state, and local levels. We never answer that phone, only let the answering machine take the call and return it in the very rare event it is someone "real". But we did not get calls on election day because we live in a state (CA) that both parties assumed (correctly) would give a majority to the President. "Get out the vote" operations (GOTV) are real and sometimes effective in states where the outcome is expected to be close. In this election there were a small number of these "swing" states where both parties thought they had a chance to win. In such states, if the early indications are that the voting is close, the party organization can redouble its efforts to contact known supporters (contributors, or merely people who are registered to that party in the public records, or people who have signed a petition or gotten on the party mailing list somehow) and persuade them to vote. (This is because in the USA, unlike some countries, it is not mandatory to vote, and rarely do even half the eligible voters do so. So if you can persuade a person who was not planning to vote, to do so, that is a net gain of 1 vote.) The purpose of this "Orca" system was to collate the reports from volunteers watching the polling places and identify precincts where a few extra votes might make a difference. You can see how serious the effort was, in that the Republicans had mustered 37,000 volunteers willing to do this sort of thankless work: to stand around polling places, politely asking people how they had voted and phone in the counts; or, sit in an office and make telephone calls to people who do not want to be called and politely urge them to go and vote. That is a large effort, and apparently wasted by poor planning.