Flaws in the ballot programming furnished by ES&S are only one of the problems that made the runoff election "a royal mess." Excerpts from the article:*

“If this is the best we can do now, we’re in big trouble this fall,” [White County Election Commissioner Norm] Southerland wrote.

“ES&S has now proven in four states that they are unable to meet deadlines for the delivery of programming, regardless of the time period they have to do the work,” [White County Election Commissioner John] Nunnally wrote to Janet Harris in the Secretary of State’s office.

“ES&S even had the gall to show up Friday and tell me they had already done all the testing on my PEB’s ‘to save me time,’” Nunnally wrote. “That’s a violation of the law, and besides that, on what grounds would I trust their testing?”

“ES&S is set up to box us into [sic] using their proprietary services for election preparation,” Nunnally wrote. “They are doing this in every state they sell. They don’t have the resources to meet the needs for these services and that is verifiable fact at this point. This cannot continue.”

“November is going to be a massive train wreck,” Nunnally wrote “Getting a bunch of lawyers together to come up with financial ‘damages’ settlement won’t fix anything.”

“Do you think ES&S keeps enough well trained people on their staff to program nationwide, general elections every month? Of course not!” Nunnally wrote. “So who is going to be doing the programming in October for the general elections? Either there are going to be far too few trained people to get the job done, or we are going to have our most critical election programmed by StaffMark, Kelly Girl, and illegal aliens.”

“Would someone please find out the password to the ES&S software that keeps me from producing my own ballots and send that to me?” Nunnally wrote. “I can't do any harm trying to produce my own, right or wrong. Wrong is all I've gotten from ES&S so far, so there's a chance I just might do better. It was pretty infuriating to spend two hours learning how to build a database only to find out that I had been password locked out of any attempt to produce a ballot. That just poured fuel on my fire.”