Business Spotlight: Election Coverage

The Nibert family is bracing for another election year.

In the past month, the owners of Elkins-Swyers Co. Inc. have spent over $50,000 on a new digital printer, which will help carry they load for some 3 million ballots they expect to produce for 33 Missouri counties.

The company generates about 80 percent of revenue from the sales of election equipment and voting systems, with the rest coming from printing services, Cory Nibert says.

“We sell the voting equipment. In-house, we do the ballot layout. We do the coding of the election program. We do all the testing, and then we send the product to the customer,” Nibert says from his 40,000-square-foot downtown building at Olive Street between Boonville and Jefferson avenues.

Siblings Cory and Melissa co-own the 105-year-old printing company with their father, Steve Nibert, who bought the business from his father in 1998. Dad works part-time, primarily overseeing financials, while the children run daily operations.

Family traditions
Steve Nibert started working for Elkins-Swyers Co. in 1971 – 17 years before his father bought the business from the Lee family that ran it for six decades. The company’s founding dates back to 1910, when William Elkins and Monroe Swyers, shoe shiners on Park Central Square, began selling pens before seeing a need for stationary and office equipment. By the 1920s, the business started providing printing services to county offices.

“It’s been almost a two-family business this whole time,” Steve says of the Niberts and the Lees, who kept the company’s history alive with the Elkins-Swyers name through the ownership changes.

Beyond election materials, the company primarily prints for municipalities in Missouri and Arkansas.

For its 100 customers, Elkins-Swyers also prints bills for water districts, municipal speeding tickets, file jackets for doctor’s offices and even orange stickers for blood labels for CoxHealth.

“We buy them for the blood bank, and use them as one of the two identifiers for drawing or receiving blood,” CoxHealth spokeswoman Kaitlyn McConnell says, declining to disclose the health system’s expenditures on the purchases.

Cory says CoxHealth orders trickle in a few times a year. “Most of our printing is forms, documents, binders – anything you’d find in a courthouse,” he says.

Elkins-Swyers’ bread and butter is election work. Through Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems, Cory says 20 counties in Missouri have purchased its newest voting machines, which accept and read ballots, and retail for about $5,500 apiece. He says Elkins-Swyers makes a small commission on the sales – the company also has a sales office in Jefferson City to serve the northern part of the state – but the bulk of its election revenue comes from the associated ballots, other printed materials such as the voting dividers and stickers, as well as service. Thirteen counties in Missouri still use older voting systems, he says, but they remain regular customers with elections.

During the two-year election cycles, Cory says employment levels fluctuate between 15 and 20. Next year, he expects revenue will more than double, and staff numbers will tick up.

A vote for technology
Jasper County Clerk Marilyn Baugh, a 40-year employee for the county that includes the cities of Joplin and Carthage, says she has worked with Elkins-Swyers since the mid ’80s.

“We started with punch cards and all of that. One year, we switched companies, and the next year we switched right back,” Baugh says.

According to Missouri secretary of state’s records, there are about a dozen qualified voting systems for state officials to use, from such companies as the Canadian Election Systems & Software to Omaha, Neb.-based Unisyn Voting Solutions.

“We love the service. They go above and beyond,” Baugh says of Elkins-Swyers. “They’ve met us election night in Mount Vernon when we needed equipment.”

In the spring, Jasper County spent about $200,000 on voting systems for 47 polling places. Cory says county clients range from five polling places to about 100 in Greene County.

New machines take digital images of each ballot cast, and they allow disabled voters to use the same system as others.

“When we got the equipment, some of the staff from Elkins-Swyers came down and helped us unpack it all and put it all together because you have to certify it and test it. There were three or four staff here all day,” Baugh says. “We had small elections in August and November and have been getting really good feedback on it.”