I can tell you that being in the room with the candidate and family and a computer, on election night, collecting data as the polls close, is one HELL of a lot more fun when you are winning.
Oh, had lunch one time with the lead consultant I did most of my work for, and a black politician who had been an active Democrat all his life, but who this campaign was switching sides because the Ds had nominated a guy he couldn't stand.
So the talk turns to ballot security, and then these guys have to start dick-sizing about ballot shenanigans they've gotten up to in the past.
"One thig you better watch out for, we have this trick where we'll wedga a pathcstick into the contact where the curtain rolls back after voting, so you can leave the booth, and the matchstick blocks the connection so the vote is not counted."
"Well, shit, we knew you were doing thet, so we'd send in guys to pull the matchstick and jimmy this little lever here, and the machin would stop registering Straight Party votes." (In black boxes, straight party votes are about 100% D)
"Shit, we knew all about that, so we disconnected that little lever when the polls opened, then shifted the pens over to where any R votes wound up for the Democrat one race over..."
And so on for 30 minutes.
Possibly as much as 50% of it was real.
I also recall chasing dome ballot boxes up in the mountains -- very rural area, no voting machines yet at that time, and three precincts in the ounty. When the poll closed, the Sherrif's guys would stop by each polling place and bring the padlocked boxes back to city hall to be opened and counted. Only one set of boxes, from the more Republican precinct,never came in. So we got out guys in the country out driving around looking for where the damn ballot boxes might have been dumped. Got a call, "Hey, over in Sherrif X's Uncle Billy's barn we got some ballot boxes here!" They bring 'em in, the vote coutners open them up -- they are from two elections previously.