Election Systems & Software

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. ES&S is a subsidiary of the McCarthy Group.

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.

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. 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, 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.

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).

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.

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. Cummings, along with Joseph Vaneck founded Automark Technical Systems LLC to develop and manufacture the machine. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

In September 2009, ES&S acquired Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold Election Systems. Following the acquisition, the Department of Justice and 14 individual states launched investigations into the transaction on antitrust grounds.

In March 2010, the Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against ES&S, seeking it to divest voting equipment systems assets it purchased in September 2009 from Premier Election Solutions in order to restore sufficient competition. The company later sold the assets to Dominion Voting Systems.

Ownership and management
As of June 2019, ES&S was wholly owned by Government Systems, Software & Services, Inc. McCarthy Group held a controlling ownership. Those with over 5% share investments in the company, as of June 2019, included Tom Burt and Tom O'Brien. Those with over 5% ownership stakes in McCarthy Group were Nancy McCarthy and Kenneth Stinson, both passive investors.

As of 2020, Burt is president and chief executive officers ES&S, and O'Brien is vice president/CFO.

Voting system certifications
In May 2013, the Election Assistance Commission certified ES&S' EVS 5.0 election management system as meeting the commission's 2005 Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines (VVSG). Products included in EVS 5.0 are ES&S' DS200 and DS850 vote tabulators.

EVS 5.0 also saw enhancements to the company's AutoMARK software, which is designed to be compliant with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 for allowing voters with disabilities to cast ballots. In October 2012, the EAC certified ES&S' Unity 3.4.0.0 election management software.

In June 2014, the Virginia Board of Elections certified EVS 5201, the first state to certify an election management system that features the ExpressVote Universal Voting System. This election system combines paper-based voting with touch screen technology that's designed to serve every eligible voter, including those with disabilities.

The same month, following the certification of EVS 5201 was certified, Fairfax County, Virginia, purchased ExpressVote Universal Voting System. which it used for the first time in its November 2014 general election.

Electronic poll books
In January 2014, the City of Chicago reached an agreement with ES&S to provide more than 2,100 ExpressPoll voter check-in and verification devices to support Chicago's 1.6 million registered voters. The electronic poll books were first used in Chicago's 2014 primary elections.

Withdrawal and Reinstatement of InkaVote
On August 3, 2007, California Secretary of state Debra Bowen withdrew approval of the ES&S InkaVote Plus after announcing a "top-to-bottom review" of the voting machines certified for use in California in March 2007. However, the InkaVote Plus was never included in the review process conducted by Bowen's office. Bowen then approved InkaVote Plus for use by Los Angeles County and the city of Los Angeles on January 2, 2008.

Oakland County, Michigan
Early voters in the 2008 U.S. presidential election in Oakland County, Michigan reported instances of malfunctioning machines, complaining that they voted for one candidate and their vote was switched to another candidate. The Oakland County county clerk reported inconsistent results with some machines during testing in October.

Four years later, during the 2012 elections, ES&S added wireless modem technology so officials could make secure reports via cell phones. This upgrade was designed to improve the transparency and accuracy of Oakland County's election night reporting. The wireless technology used by Oakland County was tested by a federally accredited voting system test laboratory and subsequently tested and approved by the State of Michigan for pilot usage in the 2012 presidential election.

2010 election problems
On April 14, 2010, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that, "about 10 percent of Cuyahoga County’s voting machines...[had] failed a pre-election test." After 20 months of investigation, the Election Assistance Commission recommended decertification of the ES&S voting machines if they could not be fixed. The investigation found:
 * "The DS200 accepts a voted ballot but does not record the ballot on its internal counter. In addition the marks of the second ballot are not recorded."
 * "When a 17” ballot was inserted at an angle, the DS200 did not consistently count the mark properly. The mark registered either as a different selection than intended or did not register at all."
 * The system randomly freezes and does not record the freeze in its log files. There are other events not logged, such as touch screen calibration.

In May 2013, however, the Election Assistance Commission certified the DS200 as part of ES&S' EVS 5.0 election management system as meeting its 2005 Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines (VVSG). Image of EAC certificate

Remote access controversy
In February 2018 article, The New York Times, reported that remote-access software had been found on an election management computer system used in Pennsylvania, and quoted unnamed sources, who said "ES&S has in the past sometimes sold its election-management system with remote-access software preinstalled." This was used by ES&S technicians to remotely access the systems via modem to troubleshoot and provide maintenance to systems they sold. The company denied this, saying "none of the employees...including long-tenured employees, has any knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software."

In an April 2018 letter sent to U.S. Senator, Election Systems & Software acknowledged that some of the election management systems the company sold for voting actually did have remote access software installed. The letter to Wyden had been in response to a question from the senator requesting clarification of the information on remote-access software in the New York Times article.

While election management systems are not the voting machines voters use to cast their ballots, they are used to program the voting machines used in a county and to count and tabulate the results from the voting machines. By installing remote access software allowing the machines to be accessed via the internet, the machines are vulnerable to being "hacked" remotely, allowing the counting to be altered surreptitiously, or malware to be installed to affect an election result. Motherboard, the site that originally published the story, reported that the remote access software installation was "the worst decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner."

According to its April 2018 letter, ES&S claims to have stopped installing remote access software as of December 2007, which is required under the standards of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Johnson County, Indiana
During the general election in November 2018, thousands of voters in Johnson County, Indiana were required to wait in line for hours as technical glitches and computer crashes caused issues throughout the county. A preliminary repor] prepared for the Indiana Secretary of State by Ball State University's Voting System Technical Oversight Program examined the reporting errors, and a preliminary report concluded that ES&S failed to report several anomalies that occurred prior to election day in violation of Indiana's state election law.

Operating software vulnerabilities
In July 2019, the Associated Press reported that, "the vast majority of 10,000 election jurisdictions nationwide use Windows 7 or an older operating system to create ballots, program voting machines, tally votes and report counts." Windows 7 reaches its "end of life" on January 14, 2020, meaning that Microsoft will cease providing technical support for the system, including patches to fix software vulnerabilities. For jurisdictions that already purchased systems running on Windows 7, ES&S said it would work with Microsoft to provide support until jurisdictions can update them. Windows 10 was released in 2015, and it was not immediately clear how long it would take to updates and associated federal and possible state certifications and to roll out updates. The company was not at the time sure that it could be done prior to the state's primaries, which began in February 2020. Kevin Skoglund, chief technologist at Citizens for Better Elections, said county election officials point to Election Assistance Commission and state certifications as "rock-solid proof" that their systems are secure, but do not realize that vendors are certifying systems under dated 2005 standards.