OMAHA, Neb.--(BUSINESS WIRE)
June 23, 2005

Today, Election Systems and Software (ES&S) announced that the ES&S AutoMARK, is now fully qualified to the latest 2002 federal standards. States and jurisdictions can now proceed with purchasing decisions with confidence that the federal review is complete.

ES&S AutoMARK is an optical scan ballot marking system designed to provide privacy and accessibility to voters who are visually impaired, or have a disability or condition that would make it difficult or impossible to mark a ballot in the usual way. In addition, the technology provides language assistance to voters who are more comfortable speaking an alternative language or who have reading difficulties.

Features of the ES&S AutoMARK include:

• Protection for voters by eliminating over-votes; minimizing under-votes; and allowing for the selection of write-in candidates.
• The ability to use the same paper ballot for all voters in a way that protects privacy and provides secure recount capability.
• An audio function, which allows visually impaired voters or those with severely impaired vision to listen to the choices through headphones.
• The ability to protect legacy systems by allowing jurisdictions to use existing optical scanner hardware/software solutions. Simply adding an ES&S AutoMARK device to a polling location ensures compliance with HAVA and eliminates the need to reinvest in a new tabulation systems.
• A sip/puff tube for voters who are not able to use the touch screen or touch pad
• A zoom feature which enables the voter to increase the font size of each race listed on the optical scan ballot. This may be especially helpful for voters who are sighted but have vision limitations
• Multiple language capability. Assuring that all citizens in a diverse population can exercise their privilege to vote, visual and audible ballots in multiple languages can be stored on a single machine.