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Minus the google being evil part, this entire operation could have been done in google sheets and would probably have gone 100 x better. With free robust revision history, permission control, and everything....

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Assuming they set it up properly and/or use multiple sheets, a single sheet for 20+ people can get real messy and hard to audit.

They probably mean via a Google Form. That’s a fairly safe way (in my experience) to add inputs from many users concurrently.

Then you get into problems dealing with erroneous entries though right?

I would set up each reporting unit (precint/causaus site) with their own sheet. There are probably only 5-10 officials per site that should even have edit access, maybe less, like only secretaries?

Make a nice formatted layout specific to that year. People feel pretty comfortable in excel-like spreadsheets/forms.

Then at the state level, since you have permission to all the sheets, its simple to aggregates all the sheet data

It's not some wiz-bang branded app with fancy animations, but its piggybacking on a very robust spreadsheet system that many people have some experience/intuition with.

This kind of naivety is likely what brought about the entire issue in the first place.

Consultants with more budget than sense seems more likely.

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