Couldn't they just create a Google Forms link share it to the field people sending the results back? It would be only 1765 lines in a Google Sheets doc, and would be practically free. (Not to mention more secure than a custom implementation by semi-incapable development contractors like in this case.)
1. Ignoring like... stupid high information transmission systems where clever solutions may be required to concurrently stream data to even dozens of customers - the data here was measurable in bytes, _maybe_ kilobytes.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/267302-sanders-campaig...
Now, this necessitated a new app, since the Microsoft one provided previously didn't address the new reporting requirements. But it was the reporting requirements, not moving from MS to a firm that had even clearer reason to suspect anti-Sanders bias, that was intended to negate the complaints of Sanders and other candidates about the 2016 cycle.
(Presume $100,000 base salary, 1.4x overhead for a salaried employee, $0 profit, all employees working on the project are developers, and no code reuse with any other project. Some of these assumptions are clearly false, but I think it gives a reasonable guess at an upper bound).
However, seeing as the developers they hired didn't bother changing the default manifest and forgot to prefix a URL with HTTPS, I hope they Shadow at least wasn't paying them that much?
Deputize 40 administrators, give them each the 45 phone numbers for their districts. At the appointed time, have the administrators direct-dial each of the 45 numbers and quickly note the results. Combine the results from the 40 as they come in.
Secure and effective. It'd probably take 3 hours to wrap it all up.
- Only allow one entry per GSuite ID in Google Forms
- Enforce yubikey 2FA on GSuite.
- Issue each captain a Pixel 1 with Google MDM for remote wiping and app deployment.
- Turn off all other apps (Docs, Fi, Photos, etc...) in GSuite.
P.S. I work at Google and internally sheets is used thoroughly to survey large numbers of employees and it can view large sheets for a lot of people in "read-only" mode pretty well.
I eventually found that if I changed how the spreadsheet was structured, a lot of problems were drastically reduced. I forget the details, but I think I switched to having one sheet that just collects form submissions and does nothing else, then another sheet that uses Javascript to pull data off the first and do the computations. That way processing was moved offline from form submission.
But the general point is, you can't just write a spreadsheet, collect thousands of form submissions, and have no issues. You can't just assume "Google scales everything". N people interacting with N (or 2N or 3N if you share with a few) spreadsheets is an embarrassingly parallel problem. N people interacting with 1 spreadsheet is not.
Had they done any of that, it might even have worked. I don't think their stack is as exciting as that.