At this time the Town owns 28 Badger Books, of those, four are servers and 24 are clients. There is one server per polling location and one for our central count location. The server is the brains of the operation and is required for operating each of the clients at each location. If there is a problem with the server, the clients will not function. Initially when the Badger Books were purchased, it was recommended by the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) that we purchase one server per location. There was also the expectation that in the event of an issue we would have technical support through the WEC so we did not order additional servers. Additionally, only one server can be in operation at a location at a time and servers cannot function as clients. So backup servers were not ordered as it was thought they would gather dust on the shelf which is not desirable, particularly when shelf space is already limited. Unfortunately on Election Day in April 2025 our central count server crashed and our remaining servers experienced intermittent issues, however, they remained operational. We immediately contacted the WEC for technical support and tried to troubleshoot over the phone, but the efforts were unsuccessful. WEC stated they would provide technical support with the servers, but it would not be on Election Day. Their recommendation was to either wait until 8:00 p.m. when the polls closed and then utilize one of the other location's servers or start processing manually. Waiting until 8:00 p.m. was impractical so we switched over to our manual process. The manual process is slower, requires more staff, and creates room for human error. For April, we had to call in additional staff to assist with the manual processing to ensure we were finished in a timely manner. During the reconciliation process on Election Night and the following days several errors were discovered in our election returns as a result (no impact on election results). To date we have not received technical support for our problem server. It would have been much more challenging to recover if any of our polling location servers went down on Election Day. So in order to ensure we have a backup server for each location, I am proposing purchasing 4 additional servers that would serve as backups for our existing servers. Estimated cost per unit is $2,500, but building in a little extra for unknown quote and supporting supplies required.
