Election Systems & Software (ES&S or ESS) is an Omaha, Nebraska-based company that manufactures and sells voting machine equipment and services. The company's offerings include vote tabulators, direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines, voter registration and election management systems, ballot-marking devices, electronic poll books, Ballot on Demand printing services, and absentee voting-by-mail services.
ES&S is a subsidiary of McCarthy Group, LLC. In 2014, ES&S was the largest manufacturer of voting machines in the United States, claiming customers in 4,500 localities in 42 states and two U.S. territories. As of 2014, the company had more than 450 employees, more than 200 of whom are located in Omaha.
In 2014, ES&S claimed that "in the past decade alone," it had installed more than 260,000 voting systems, more than 15,000 electronic poll books, provided services to more than 75,000 elections. The company has installed statewide voting systems in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, and West Virginia. As of 2019 ES&S claimed a U.S. market share of more than 60 percent in customer voting system installations.
The company maintains 10 facilities in the United States, two field offices in Canada (Pickering, Ontario; and Vancouver, British Columbia) and a warehouse in Jackson, Mississippi.
History
Corporate Ancestors
American Information Systems
In October 1974, Robert J. Urosevich of the Klopp Printing Company of Omaha approached Westinghouse Learning Corporation (a subsidiary of Westinghouse Corporation) with a simple question: Could the scanners Westinghouse was building for educational tests be used to scan ballots? This led Westinghouse to briefly enter the ballot scanning business, and Robert Urosevich and his brother Tod, a former IBM salesman, formed Data Mark Systems to sell and service Westinghouse vote tabulation equipment. Data Mark and Westinghouse ballot tabulation equipment saw limited success through the late 1970s. As Westinghouse withdrew from the voting business, the Urosevich brothers and several former Westinghouse employees founded a new company in August 1979, American Information Systems. AIS came out with a line of central-count ballot scanners that entered the marketplace in 1982.
Business Records Corporation
The first precinct-count ballot scanner was the Gyrex MTB-1, which came to market around 1974. The MTB-1 evolved into the MTB-2 while corporate ownership shifted from Gyrex Corporation to Valtec, in 1977, to Major Data Concepts, in 1979. Computer Election Systems Incorporated (CESI), a manufacturer of Votomatic punched-card voting equipment, marketed the MTB-2 as the Tally-II scanner in the early 1980s, pairing it with its own Precinct-Ballot-Conut punched-card ballot reader, the PBC.
CESI developed its own family of precinct-count and later central-count scanners, under the Optech brand name. The Optech I precinct-count scanner came to market in 1983, and saw successful use in several states. Cronus Industries, Inc., a Texas company, purchased CESI in 1985 and merged it with their ballot printing subsidiary, Business Records Corporation (BRC).
Election Products Inc. Election Products Inc. was a small Virginia-based election service company. In the early 1990s, the company contracted with ILJ Corporation of Richmond, Virginia, to develop a DRE voting machine that would be marketed as the Votronic (unrelated to an earlier ballot scanner that was marketed under the same name in the 1960s). This voting machine had a flat panel liquid crystal display and a touchscreen, and was not much bigger than the laptop computers of its time. The Votronic saw its first use in the 1996 primary season; one commentator said it resembled a large Magna Doodle.
Automark Technical Systems LLC
In 2003, Eugene Cummings filed a patent for a ballot marking device specifically designed to provide an accessible voting interface for optical-scan voting systems. Cummings, along with Joseph Vaneck founded Automark Technical Systems LLC to develop and manufacture the machine. Prior to the availability of this machine, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 effectively required jurisdictions in the United States that used optical scan systems to install at least one DRE voting machine in each polling place.