A similar intuition may have led this team to skip spending the last few months on rollout / training / testing

From a technical perspective where only informed and good actors are involved, I suspect many of us could code up a working website in less than an hour. But if you look at the issues reported on at the Des Moines Register [1] it seems the job was about creating a reporting system in an environment where people are actively trying to disrupt the system, possibly some of the reporters themselves cannot be trusted. I think you'd need to sit through a few meetings with the right people before you'd even understand what was required. You've got to find tech/security people from previous campaigns to understand what the dirty tricks are that people use to f with the results for example.

[1] https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presi...

I don't even know why it is an app. A simple web page would be perfect for this.

From anecdote; I've seen a months old project go to internal alpha that crashed immediately because the lead developer didn't set rails to production mode.

There are many web sites where a 1700 request burst would hurt.

Very wild guess: they did test it and maybe even stress tested it... with the phones they had in their office. Out in the field people were using different phones with various versions of the mobile OS.

Not sure if this is an Android or iOS app but either way, it's possible there was something quirky in the implementation that didn't show up on the test phones or simulator. They may have even made a poor assumption such as there always being a network connection. That would be the case in their office but not guaranteed out in rural areas especially in rural areas with a sudden convergence of lots of people with cell phones in a confined space that doesn't usually have that much device density.