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 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 of 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 the 1960s). This voting machine had a flat panel liquid crystal display and a touchscreen, and was not much bigger than the laptop computers of its time. The Votronic saw its first use in the 1996 primary season; one commentator said it resembled a large Magna Doodle. Automark Technical Systems LLC In 2003, Eugene Cummings filed a patent for a ballot marking device specifically 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 the availability of this machine, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 effectively required jurisdictions in the United States that used optical scan systems to 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, where each customer was typically a county election office. As a result of this merger, ES&S became the largest voting system vendor in the United States. This merger was delayed by the United States 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 the Votronic. They immediately made major cosmetic changes to the Votronic, renaming it the iVotronic. In their sales presentations, ES&S emphasized that