The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters).
Putting the bulk of computing and storage in the data center has other perks for IT management: It creates a centralized location for software upgrades across an entire organization and puts a layer of network security between users and sensitive data--a lost thin client laptop, for instance, doesn't contain private information, and so doesn't pose a threat of causing a data breach.