You could twist that the other way, though. The Democratic organization was highly decentralized, leaner and more effective than the Romney campaign bloc, centralized and huge in Boston HQ.
It was also fault tolerant. In 2008, at least, Democrats had paper backup for things that went wrong with the tech, and did end up using it at times.
In 2012, Republicans hadn't done any due diligence and assumed their tech would work. So sure they were that their tech would work is that they only released it to users on Election Day itself...
Indeed, and frankly I think the US dodged a bullet in that respect. I've always been interested in politics and have a belief that there's a strong correlation between the way the campaign goes and the way governance would go if the candidate is elected.
Decentralization is really the key thing, not whether the work is done by the government versus contractors. The government can be very efficient doing things in-house as long as the efforts are decentralized. The US Attorneys Offices handle tremendous caseloads for their staffing levels relative to private law firms. The Army Corps of Engineers is also quite effective because it's decentralized.
Things that are a mess are often centralized and involve too many contractors. Defense, the VA, etc.
