My son was there working as volunteer, and so was his ex-girlfriend, who's still a close family friend. I was chatting with them both throughout the evening and into the wee hours this morning.
They worked different locations in the Des Moines metro area and the results they reported to me were pretty close to the same in both.
I'll say this about it, it's hard to imagine that less than 4500 calls to a server over the course of an hour or two would "crash" it, or even ten times that number. And that I think an SQL db is a poor choice for an app like that.
CouchDB, or most any open source "nosql" db, would've been a better choice and, really, so would a dead simple flat file db to store the data for each precinct in and those are both very easy to build for something as simple as this.
And they didn't even need an "app" per se. All they needed was a password protected web page with a dead simple form.
What happened makes it a bit difficult to avoid pondering if the delays weren't deliberate. Whatever the case may be, the DNC is who ended up taking it on the chin.