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, DRE voting machines, voter registration and election management systems, ballot-marking devices, electronic poll books, ballot on demand printing services, and absentee voting-by-mail services.
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, over 200 of whom are located in its Omaha headquarters.
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, and 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 ten facilities in the United States, two field offices in Canada located in Pickering, Ontario and Vancouver, British Columbia, and a warehouse in Jackson, Mississippi.
History American Information Systems
In October 1974, Robert J. Urosevich of Klopp Printing Company in Omaha approached Westinghouse Learning Corporation, a subsidiary of Westinghouse Corporation, asking whether the scanners Westinghouse was building for educational tests could be used to scan voting ballots. This led Westinghouse to briefly enter the ballot scanning business, and Urosevich and his brother Tod, a former IBM salesman, formed Data Mark Systems to sell and service Westinghouse voter tabulation equipment. Data Mark and Westinghouse ballot tabulation equipment had limited success through the late 1970s.Jon McMillin papers, University of Iowa Library, Special Collections, see particularly the catalog description of box 36.Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons, Broken Ballots, CSLI Publications, 2012; see Section 4.1 on, page 64. 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). 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.Analytic Systems Inc., Section 4.4, Gyrex Corporation, Describe, Analize and Compare the Currently Available Methods of Vote Counting Equipment and to make Appropriate Recommendations, final report prepared for the General Accounting Office under Contract No. GA-924, October 1974. The MTB-1 evolved into the MTB-2, and corporate ownership shifted from Gyrex Corporation to Valtec, in 1977, and then to Major Data Concepts, in 1979. Computer Election Systems Incorporated (CESI), the 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.Douglas W. Jones, On Optical Mark Scanning, Section 6: Second Chance Voting, Towards Trustworthy Elections: New Directions in Electronic Voting, D. L. Chaum, M. Jacobsson, R. L. Rivest, et al, eds, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol 6000 (2010).
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-based company, purchased CESI in 1985 and merged it with their ballot printing subsidiary, Business Records Corporation (BRC).Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons, Broken Ballots, CSLI Publications, 2012; see Section 4.2 on, page 66.
Cronus Industries Cronus Industries was formed in September 1976. Cronus, named after the Greek god Cronus, was an offshoot of Dallas, Texas-based company Tyler Corporation, which was previously a high tech military contractor known as Saturn Industries. Throughout the 1980s, its subsidiary, Business Records Corporation (BRC), acquired multiple small private companies that focused on providing information for local and county governments in the United States, including land records, election equipment and government software.
In 1983, Cronus began divesting from its agricultural equipment business. In 1984, Cronus acquired a steel-coating plant in Fairfield, Alabama from U.S. Steel. Between 1985 and 1986, Cronus acquired Computer Election Systems (CES) and eight other election equipment companies. After acquiring CES, Cronus chairman and CEO C. A. Rundell, Jr. claimed in 1985 that the company controlled 40% of the election equipment market in the United States, but refused to share a similar answer in 1988.
CES was founded in 1969 by four IBM employees: Robert P. Varni, Joseph H. Chowning, Jack Gerbel, and Ken Hazlett. In 1969, CES was one of five companies licensed by IBM to sell the Votomatic voting machine. The company went public in 1973, and its Votomatic had been integrated into 1,000 jurisdictions across the United States by the mid-1980s. In 1977, CES was purchased by an investment firm owned by Republican Prentis Cobb Hale, who strongly supported Ronald Reagan. According to The Texas Observer, the CES founders tended to lean Republican. According to one of the co-founders, CES faced a significant service decline under Hale’s leadership, starting around the 1980 United States elections.
By 1986, Cronus sold two of its subsidiaries (American Buildings Company and Polymer Metals Inc.), intending to focus on BRC.
By 1987, three investment firms collectively owned 19% of outstanding stock: First Pacific Advisors, Alex Brown Investment Management Company, and Charter Oak Partners, with the latter owning 10%.
In 1987, Cronus sued Shoup Voting Machine Corporation, accusing the company of copyright infringement over BRC’s DRE voting machines. Shoup in turn accused Cronus of attempting to monopolize the election equipment market in the United States and of enabling electoral fraud.
Also in 1987, Fred Meyer, the former president of Tyler Corporation, had run for mayor of Dallas. Rundell contributed $5,000 to Meyer's campaign. By 1988, Meyer was the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas. Rundell also contributed to right-wing Democrats Lloyd Bentsen and Ray Farabee.
In 1988, Rosewood Financial Inc., an investment vehicle which was owned by Caroline Rose Hunt and created by her estate trust, purchased a 6% stake in Cronus Industries. In the 1980s, Rosewood also had ownership in PVH Corp., First Executive, and IMC Global. According to a spokesman for Rosewood, Hunt did not take an active role in managing the company. Lloyd Donald Brinkman also owned over 5% by 1988.
Also in 1988, P.E. 'Bill' Esping, founder of First Data, became president and CEO of Cronus and BRC, a position he held until his death in 1998. He owned $10 million in company securities in 1988, which was equivalent to 12% ownership.
In 1990, Cronus changed its name to Business Records Corporation Holdings, Inc., and then again in 1992 to Business Records Corporation Holding Company. The company acquired CMSI, a private Oregon-based firm that sold information management services to healthcare organizations and local governments, in 1993. In 1996, the company changed its name again to BRC Holdings, Inc., expanding its focus to healthcare consulting by acquiring The Pace Group. After selling its election business to American Information Systems and Sequoia Pacific Systems in 1997, BRC Holdings Inc. was acquired by Affiliated Computer Services in 1998.
In 1996, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission sent a cease-and-desist letter to an investor, Alexander Sheshunoff, Sr., accusing him of market manipulation by attempting to influence the closing price of BRC between 1990 and 1995. He owned 5.32% of BRC common stock in 1989 and 8.05% of common stock in 1994.
Election Products Inc. Election Products Inc. was a small Virginia-based election service company. In the early 1990s, the company contracted with ILJ Corporation based in 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 1960. This voting machine had a flat panel liquid crystal display and a touchscreen, and was no larger than a laptop computer at the time. Votronic was first used in the 1996 primary elections; one commentator said the machine resembled a large Magna Doodle.Voting Becomes More sophisticated, Washington Technology, March 7, 1996.The Present and Future Ballot, page 9 of Vote, the Machinery of Democracy, Smithsonian Institution, 2004.Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons, Broken Ballots, CSLI Publications, 2012; see Section 5.3.1 on, page 102.
Automark Technical Systems LLC
In 2003, Eugene Cummings filed a patent for a ballot marking device designed to provide an accessible voting interface for optical-scan voting systems.Eugene Cummings, Ballot Marking System and Apparatus, , issued July 25, 2006. Cummings, along with Joseph Vaneck founded Automark Technical Systems LLC to develop and manufacture the machine.Kate Ryan, Firm unveils new voter technology, ChicagoBusiness.com, September 22, 2004. Prior to this machine, the Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, required jurisdictions in the United States that used optical scan systems install at least one DRE voting machine in each polling place.Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons, Broken Ballots, CSLI Publications, 2012; see Section 5.5, pages 111-115, and Section 9.3, pages 218-221.
Mergers and antitrust actions
American Information Systems acquired the Election Services Division of Business Records Corporation and was reincorporated as Election Systems & Software, Inc. in December 1997. At the time, AIS had about 750 customers and BRC had around 1200; customers were typically county election offices. With the merger, ES&S became the largest voting system vendor in the United States.Section 4A: Status Report Concerning Recertification of Business Records Corporation PC/BT Voting System, Meeting Minutes, Indiana Election Commission, November 25, 1997. The merger was delayed by the U.S. Department of Justice on antitrust grounds until ES&S agreed to transfer the Optech product line to Sequoia Voting Systems, while retaining the right to sell and service Optech products to its existing customers.
Shortly after the BRC-AIS merger, ES&S acquired the rights to Votronic, which they renamed iVotronic, and made major cosmetic changes to it. In their sales presentations, ES&S emphasized that the iVotronic was essentially the same machine as the Votronic except for features added to bring it into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.Section 3: Demonstration of the ES&S iVotronic DRE Voting System, Minutes, Indiana Election Commission, August 7, 2001
ES&S was one of the top four providers of voting equipment used in the November 2004 election. The other three were Diebold Election Systems, Sequoia Voting Systems, and Hart InterCivic.
In January 2008, ES&S acquired AutoMARK Technical Systems.Company Overview of AutoMARK Technical Systems, LLC, Bloomberg, accessed August 2016. Under ES&S's ownership, AutoMARK's use expanded considerably. Eight years after its acquisition by ES&S, in the 2016 elections, it was used statewide in ten states, and widely used in 19 additional states.Election Systems and Software (ES&S) AutoMARK , Verified Voting, accessed August 2016.