There was lots of reporting last week about the decision to award New York City’s huge voting machine contract to the ES&S, but the really interesting story slipped by nearly unnoticed – Nassau County, home to nearly 1 million registered voters, announced they were abandoning their recently purchased Dominion ImageCast machines for ES&S systems. This announcement came as quite a surprise because Nassau County has been using the Dominion machines for accessible voting in all polling places since 2008, as well as spent time and money training poll workers in the use of the new systems. So how is it that ES&S managed to snatch away Nassau County, in terms of voting system sales the second largest prize in New York State, from the much smaller Dominion? The answer is a cautionary tale about the power of a near monopoly to force smaller competitors out of the market.
ES&S has long been one of a handful of voting machine companies dominating the United States market. But recently, with Sequoia Voting Systems struggling financially, and the absorption of Diebold into ES&S (a move opposed by many), the company already has a near-stranglehold on providing voting systems and services to election officials. In New York State however, ES&S faces a small competitor from just across Lake Ontario in Canada, Dominion Voting. Dominion designed and built the ImageCast, a new scanner and accessible ballot marker combination system that many County Boards of Elections around the state, including Nassau, liked enough to order and use in 2008 and 2009 [Note – initially Dominion partnered with Sequoia to bring the ImageCast to New York, but Sequoia later pulled out and turned the contract over to Dominion]. Indeed, even if New York City chose the ES&S DS200 scanner, a decision finally made this week, little upstart Dominion would still have provided over half of the Empire State’s huge number of voting machines! But big companies like Wal-Mart and ES&S don’t stand around idly letting small competitors take what they see as their market share. And the way they do it is by being big enough to offer customers deals that are simply too good to pass up. And that’s exactly what ES&S did in Nassau County.
