Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S)

Election Systems & Software (ES&S), a company that makes nearly half the voting machines used in the United States, including all those used in Nebraska.

History
Founded in 1996 as American Information Systems Inc. (AIS), it merged with Business Records Corp. the following year and changed its name to ES&S.

ES&S is a subsidiary of McCarthy Group Inc., which is jointly held by the holding firm and the Omaha World-Herald Co., the publisher of Nebraska's largest newspaper.

In January 2003, The Hill reported that "In a disclosure form filed in 1996, covering the previous year, Chuck Hagel, then a Senate candidate, did not report that he was still chairman of AIS for the first 10 weeks of the year, as he was required to do."

"Hagel's unrecorded stake in the voting systems company poses an apparent conflict of interest on election reform issues. Three companies, including ES&S, stand to make a large profits from election reform legislation enacted last year by Congress," Alexander Bolton reported.

The Hill noted that an official at Nebraska's Election Administration estimated that ES&S machines calculated approximately 85 percent of the votes cast in the two elections - 1996 and 2002 - that Hagel contested.

ES&S iVotronic Audit Log Bugs
In May 2004 the Miami Daily Business Review reported that an official, Orlando Suarez had found a "serious bug" in Miami-Dade's ES&S election equipment nearly a year earlier. ES&S had known about this serious bug for nearly a year and had not fixed it.

In his memo Suarez wrote "In my humble opinion (and based on my over 30 years of experience in the information technology field)".

"I believe that there is/are a serious 'bug' in the program(s)that generate these reports making these reports unusable for the purpose that we were considering (audit an election, recount an election and if necessary, use these reports to certify an election)."

$750,000 Settlement for Delays Cause By Software Flaws
AP reported in August 2006 that ES&S agreed to a $750,000 settlement to a legal action by the Indiana government after flaws it its software resulted in "delays for some Indiana voters and election officials during the state's May primary." The ES&S spokesman was Ken Fields from Fleishman-Hillard. O'Dwyer's PR Daily reported, the day following the AP story, that Fleishman was representing ES&S. 

Related SourceWatch articles

 * Electronic voting Index of articles
 * E-Voting: Digital Democracy or a Cash Cow for Consultants?
 * Selling electronic voting
 * A Short but Tragic History of E-voting Public Relations
 * e-voting
 * e-voting PR
 * Voting machine
 * Bush's Rangers
 * David Bear
 * Public Strategies, Inc.
 * Fleishman-Hillard

External articles

 * Matthew Haggman, "New Questions Arise About Touch-Screen Voting Machines: In audit of iVotronic's performance in a Florida city, 162 ballots failed to appear, flaw was slow to surface", Miami Daily Business Review, May 27, 2004.


 * Matthew Haggman, "Count Crisis? Elections official warns of glitches that may scramble vote auditing", Miami Daily Business Review, May 13, 2004.


 * Alexander Bolton, "Hagel's ethics filings pose disclosure issue, The Hill, January 29, 2003.


 * Douglas W Jones, "Recommendations for the Conduct of Elections in Miami-Dade County using the ES&S iVotronic System", June 7, 2004. (Jones is with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa).
 * Cynthia L. Webb, "IT Clouds Over the Sunshine State", Washington Post, July 30, 2004.
 * Charles Wilson, "Company agrees to $750,000 settlement for election troubles", Associated Press, August 22, 2006.
 * "ES&S Counts on F-H," O'Dwyer's PR Daily (sub req'd), August 23, 2006.
 * C.D. Sludge, Sludge Report #154 - Bigger Than Watergate!, scoop.co.nz, July 8, 2003. Another copy re Bev Harris's investigative report at TruthOut.org.


 * Lynn Landes, How We Lost The Vote - How To Get It Back, ecotalk.org, September 7, 2003.


 * Andrew Donoghue, Michael Moore attacks e-voting, zdnet.co.uk, November 10, 2003.
 * Michael Hardy, Bias in the voting box?, fcw.com, November 10, 2003.


 * Paul Krugman, Hack the Vote, New York Times Op-Ed, December 2, 2003.


 * Julie Carr Smyth, "Voting Machine Controversy", Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 28, 2003.


 * M.C. Moewe, "Survey contradicts vote machine firm's failure rate claim," Daytona News Journal (Fla.), November 8, 2007.

External resources
Other Websites
 * Insider Memos - The Smoking Guns of "Black Box Voting" Election Fraud Dangers. Several years' worth of memos hosted on five non-U.S. servers. Most links are working (12/02/03).
 * Bev Harris's Black Box Voting web site.
 * Bev Harris, "Senate Ethics Director resigns; Senator Chuck Hagel admits owning voting machine company McCarthy Group", scoop.co.nz, January 31, 2003.
 * Bev Harris, Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program, Scoop.co.nz, July 8, 2003. Introduction; Part 1: Can the votes be changed?; Part 2: Can the password be by-passed?; Part 3: Can the audit log be altered?.


 * David L. Dill's verifiedvoting.org web site:
 * "In response to the 2000 Florida debacle, Congress passed a law, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which mandates voting process reform in all the states."
 * "Mr. Darryl R. Wold, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) believes that HAVA requires a voter-verifiable paper trail."


 * List of ES&S failures from 1998 to 2006 (PDF), compiled by VotersUnite

Contact details Election Systems & Software, Inc. 11208 John Galt Blvd Omaha, Nebraska 68137 USA Toll Free: 1-800-247-8683 Phone: 402-593-0101 Fax: 402-593-8107 Web: http://www.essvote.com/