The backup plan was to call in. However, they only had 12 callers ready to take calls, for ~1800 precincts. At 3 minutes per call, that is 7+ hours to call in the results.
They should have rather invested a tiny share of the money spent on that dysfunctional app on one of those gig working websites to rent themselves some personnel for the evening to take calls. Could have even marketed that as "Woah, see how INNOVATIVE and MODERN we are, we're using this gig working thing!".
Combine that with renting a solid and battle-tested VoIP solution for a few days to supply the short-term workers with (soft-)phones and the precincts with numbers to call, the story gets even better from a marketing perspective - now they could add the punchline "See, we're using INTERNET TELEPHONY hosted in THE CLOUD!".
Additionally, the results phone number was the same as the helpdesk phone number. This means that everyone that was having trouble with the app was calling the same number that everyone was using to report numbers.
Combine that with renting a solid and battle-tested VoIP solution for a few days to supply the short-term workers with (soft-)phones and the precincts with numbers to call, the story gets even better from a marketing perspective - now they could add the punchline "See, we're using INTERNET TELEPHONY hosted in THE CLOUD!".