Who we are

SOCO was founded by Larry Slaugh. During the 80’s, Larry marketed computerized voting machines to Counties throughout the United States. He also trained and supervised Poll Workers in Local, State, and National Elections. In 1993, he decided to apply the expertise he had gathered during those years to Union Elections, and SOCO was born.

SOCO is now run by his son, Robert Slaugh. Robert brought with him his experience in writing software to manage elections and created the system used by SOCO.

The SOCO System

The work horse of our system is the ScanOptics OMR 2000, capable of reading 150 cards per minute. It is driven by software written in Microsoft Visual Basic, running on a Windows Laptop.

We have 2 standards cards. The “Long” card is 7 ¾” x 3 ¼” with 96 voting positions, meaning it could handle a ballot with up to 96 candidates. The “Short” card is just less than 6 inches long with 48 voting positions. We have found that these cards can handle 99% of the elections we have encountered. We have other formats available. We can also custom design a card, if needed.