On election day, 2008, the Obama campaign experimented with a new system designed to fix one of the strategic problems that can plague election efforts: not knowing which of the potential voters field organizers work so hard to identify as supporters have actually made it to their polling place when it finally counts. Called "Project Houdini," the campaign planned to used technology to vanish voters from its highly-cultivated contact lists in real time. If it could pull of the trick, the campaign could gain a strategic advantage by not wasting critical resources (people, vans, etc.) to pulling in votes that had already been banked. Newsweek's Special Election Project described what Project Houdini aimed to do:

The Obama campaign's New Media experts created a computer program that would allow a "flusher"—the term for a volunteer who rounds up nonvoters on Election Day—to know exactly who had, and had not, voted in real time. They dubbed it Project Houdini, because of the way names disappear off the list instantly once people are identified as they wait in line at their local polling station.

But, while there's still digging to be done, it's clear that in some critical swing states Houdini didn't quite work as planned. More importantly, when it collapsed, it took down some critical reporting channels with it.