Bellevue supports move to new voter tabulators

BELLEVUE – During its May 28 meeting, the Bellevue Village Board unanimously approved a resolution to support the purchase of new voter tabulator machines.

“What is happening is the current DS-200 tabulators that we're using for elections are 12 years old. They're past their useful life, or their recommended life of 10 years. There is a bit of concern that they may start failing and cause questions amongst the public. So, Brown County was investigating upgrading,” Bellevue Director of Finance/Clerk-Treasurer Michelle Seidl explained to the board.

“They found the newer version of this model in the DS-300. They did reach out to all Brown County municipalities, because right now they are, as a whole, providing them and servicing them and programming them for us. And they decided that, based on our experience with the DS 200, that it was a good choice to go and upgrade to the DS-300.

“The Village of Bellevue itself would need 10. Based on our current population, we only have four right now, so we know that we need more, but don't want to do anything with the current tabulators that we have because we know that they're going out.

“So what they're asking for is the support to move forward, and they're hoping that they're going to be able to find funding so that each individual municipality won't have to pay for their machines there; but to let you know there could potentially be a possibility, if they're not able to find grant funding, that this is an expense we will have to cover.”

Seidl said that they were planning to have the new tabulators in place for the February 2026 election and that the expected cost for 10 machines is $100,000.

 “We just don’t want to deviate from whatever Brown County is doing, because they do all of the programming for us. They do the ballot printing, and if we go off on our own, we have to do that ourselves and it’s probably going to be more costly,” Seidl added.

 “Really, based on our population numbers, we need three (village hall), three at 1811 (community center) and four at central count.”

The matter is expected to appear before the county board on June 18.