Broward County, Florida
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Picture this: It's election morning in Broward County, Florida, the second-largest county in one of America's most scrutinized swing states. Outside early voting sites, lines are already forming. News cameras are rolling. The stakes? Nothing less than public trust in democracy itself.
Behind the scenes, IT Director Robert Scott and his team are orchestrating a logistical ballet that would make most IT professionals break out in a cold sweat. They're managing:
- 1,600 poll book devices (iPads for voter check-in)
- 1,200 ballot scanning machines
- 400 ADA-compliant voting machines
- 1,400 cell phones
- 400 mobile hotspots
- 55 5G routers
150 printers
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Scott's team swells from 25 to 70 people during election season, coordinating equipment delivery, managing training sites, and supporting early voting locations across the county. It's not just Election Day—it's months of preparation, with every single component critical to ensuring voters can exercise their fundamental right.
Many key services – including vote-by-mail requests, every polling location lookup, every result query from anxious citizens and media outlets – flow through one mission-critical point of failure: the county website.
When Your Hosting Vendor Becomes Your Vulnerability
In 2022, Scott had just joined Broward County when disaster struck.
The website – hosted by the vendor that supplied their core voter registration software – began experiencing performance issues. Slow load times. Timeouts. Then, on Election Day itself, complete failure. The site went dark.
For Broward County—with its two-decade history of election controversies—this was catastrophic. News coverage followed. Explanations were demanded. The vendor admitted fault, promised fixes, and assured everyone the problem was solved.
It wasn't.
Eight Weeks to Save the Election
Fast forward to 2024. Eight weeks before Election Day, the same performance problems resurfaced.
Scott's team investigated. The vendor blamed everything: a CDN they'd implemented, network issues, mysterious configuration problems. But the truth became painfully clear—the vendor's solution, a single server running on a cloud platform using "the old school way of doing things," simply couldn't handle the traffic demands of a modern election.
Scott faced an impossible choice: trust a vendor that had failed them twice, or attempt something audacious – migrate to an entirely new platform with weeks to spare.
"Typically, we don't make changes that close because of obvious reasons," Scott recalls. The risk of being caught mid-migration during an election would be worse than the current situation.
But doing nothing meant accepting failure.
The Usual Suspects Won't Help
Scott did what any responsible IT director would do: he went to the biggest names in tech, from Microsoft to Amazon.
The responses were sobering.
Scott said Microsoft offered a solution without a content management system because of the timeframe, and they weren't even confident they could deliver that. He remembered AWS suggesting vendors who wanted to provide the same old-school server-based approach that had already failed. Others simply said: "We can't do it. It's too close."
Time was running out. The election was approaching. And being halfway through a migration would be worse than not migrating at all.
Enter the Code Red Team
Then Scott found Pantheon and KWALL.
Where others saw an impossible timeline, they saw an engineering challenge and an opportunity to support the democratic process. Where others offered outdated single-server solutions, Pantheon provided modern container-based infrastructure with horizontal scaling and a global CDN. Where others hesitated, KWALL, a digital agency with nearly 20 years of public sector experience, said they could do it.
The decision was made five to six weeks before Election Day. "It was pretty crazy, honestly," Scott admits.
Racing the Clock for the Lift & Shift Migration
What made this possible wasn't just confidence—it was the right combination of expertise, technology, and partnership.
KWALL specializes in Drupal. It is an open-source content management system with over a 20-year track record, battle-tested security from thousands of developers worldwide, and crucially, built-in features that meant they wouldn't be reinventing basic functionality under pressure. Drupal is a powerful and flexible choice for many governments: 12% of midsize counties and 25.9% of large counties in the US rely on it.
The strategy: a "lift and shift" migration. Since there was no time for redesign (and government approvals for visual changes would take months), KWALL would:
- Scrape the existing site to capture all content
- Rebuild the architecture in Drupal while preserving the exact look
- Reuse all existing CSS and JavaScript to maintain visual consistency
- Migrate content programmatically using automated web scraping
- Add security enhancements like two-factor authentication
- Test everything on Pantheon's infrastructure
“With Pantheon and KWALL, we found partners with modern technology. Why would I move to a new solution that uses the same old-school approach? Pantheon's platform, ease of use, and interface were night and day compared to other vendors. You couldn't even compare, honestly,” said Scott.
Two Weeks from Zero Hour
The KWALL team worked nights and weekends. Two parallel tracks ran simultaneously – theme building and content migration – collapsing what would normally be sequential phases into overlapping sprints.
Fernando Chavez, KWALL's VP of Solutions and Strategy, describes viewing the page source of the old site, grabbing visible assets, and "finagling" them into a Drupal theme that would render identically. Meanwhile, web crawlers captured every page, processing content into the new database structure.
Two weeks before Election Day, they flipped the switch. This rarely happens in government.
"It was very stressful leading up to that," Scott remembers. "As an IT Director, you worry about everything: DNS changes, downtime. Luckily for us, Pantheon and KWALL worked together and made that transition very seamless, no downtime, no issues!"
The new site looked identical to users—except now it ran on modern, scalable infrastructure designed to handle traffic spikes.
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Election Day 2024: No News is Good News
The website handled every request. Vote-by-mail applications flowed through smoothly. Polling location lookups worked flawlessly. As results began coming in, traffic surged—and the site held steady.
There were no performance issues. No outages. No problems.
For Scott, mission accomplished: "One of my biggest concerns was the website's appearance—you can't change a government site without endless approvals. For KWALL to match the exact look while rebuilding everything underneath in five to six weeks was huge. We didn't have the internal resources or web expertise to do that ourselves. Having zero issues in 2024, after all the problems with the old vendor, was a massive win.”
Elsewhere in Florida, many election websites crashed on Election Day again while running with the same legacy vendor. “Out of 67 counties, 65 were down. It was just us and Dade County that stayed up because we no longer use that vendor. It was a big news day because of outages everywhere except for us. Our Supervisor was having a great day because we had no issues at all,” said Scott.
What Made the Impossible Possible
This wasn't just a technical success story. It was a masterclass in how the right partnerships, tools, and expertise can overcome seemingly impossible odds:
Modern infrastructure matters. Pantheon's container-based architecture with horizontal scaling and global CDN wasn't just faster – it was fundamentally more resilient than single-server solutions.
Open source accelerates development. Drupal's mature ecosystem meant core features like menus, image handling, and content management were solved problems. KWALL could focus on solving Broward's specific needs, not reinventing wheels.
Expertise beats brand names. The biggest tech companies in the world couldn't commit to the timeline. Pantheon and KWALL, both with public sector experience, could and did.
Trust is earned under pressure. The long-standing partnership between KWALL and Pantheon meant they could coordinate seamlessly when every hour counted.
“The key takeaway from the story is that partnerships matter. The fact that KWALL has a long-standing, trusted relationship with Pantheon, and now with Broward County, is what made this successful. We had the technical chops, we had the right platform in Pantheon, and we had the customer commitment,” summarized Chavez.
The Lasting Impact
Today, Broward County's election website runs on infrastructure that can scale to demand. Non-technical staff can easily update content through an intuitive interface. Security is enhanced with two-factor authentication. And perhaps most importantly, public trust is protected.
For Scott's team, the change is liberating. "We used to help out our non-technical teammates in communications because our old CMS was not intuitive," he explains about the old system. "With Drupal, that burden's gone. I don't have any more problems. It's such a vast difference."
The site that once caused stressful news coverage for failure now quietly does its job—exactly as critical infrastructure should.
