UALR alum talks life in election business, importance of alumni involvement
August 24-30, 2015
By Becca Bona
Paul Nolte is not an easy man to pin down when it comes to professions. He’s been a salesman, a program developer, a businessman, and an enthusiastic participant in the voting business for over 20 years.
His career path isn’t clean-cut, but it led Nolte to discover his passion for technology. A resident of Arkansas since the age of four, Nolte first went to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville before transferring to UALR, then Little Rock University, for his second year.
He became a little more serious during his time at UALR, and chose to study marketing with a minor in advertising. He took a year off to join the National Guard with a friend, right before the Vietnam War broke out. What he calls, a bit of “blind luck,” resulted in his avoidance of the subsequent draft.
During school, he found a job which gave him more insight into advertising, a route he hoped to follow. “Advertising was very interesting to me,” he says. He worked with Peerless Engraver’s. “They did a lot of paper engraving for the Arkansas Gazette – for their pictures and everything,” he says.
Directly out of school in ‘67, however, Nolte took a job as a sales promotion person for RJ Reynolds Tobacco company in Amarillo, Texas. Even though he smoked at the time, his heart wasn’t in it. “I really was uncomfortable promoting cigarettes,” he remembers.
He would hold several jobs before finding his niche. He fondly refers to this time in his life as his “floundering” stage. From working as a claims adjustor to brokering printing, he did it all.
It was in 1971 when he was brokering printing, in fact, that he was introduced to Margaret Erim, the then-secretary of the Pulaski County Election Commission. At the time, he had struck gold from a printer’s perspective. “The first year I printed some things like election proclamations, but pretty soon I was printing all the absentee ballots and doing everything they did,” he says.
He found himself at home in the printing side of the election business. “I really enjoyed working with elections,” he says, “So, after the election in ’76, I started thinking that I would really like to do something election-related full time. It was truly fun work because it took a lot of thought and attention to detail, and the deadlines were critical.”
At the time, voters in Pulaski County and beyond were using Automatic Voting Machines (AVM), which required a large pack of carbonized paper designed to prove that at the beginning of the day, all of the numbers were at zero.
Nolte wanted to modernize the process, so he redesigned the paper pack with carbonless paper. “I built a little office in the garage … and I redesigned this form to make it look more modern. Then I hit the road selling these things,” he says. He traveled all over the country and met success with his product.
When he returned home, however, he was unsure of how to manufacture the paper on a wide scale, but thankfully some of his UALR connections pulled him through. Alfred Williams, a fraternity brother of Nolte’s, convinced his dad to help. “E. Granger Williams co-signed my financing note at Twin City Bank,” Nolte remembers. Another fraternity brother, John Tuohey, an attorney at the time, helped him negotiate a contract with the AVM corporation in New York.
He also had help from Bart Roach, whose family had a paper company at the time. Roach sold him the truckload of paper needed to produce the printing packs. Yet another friend, Robert Wooley, helped engineer a gadget that applied holes at the top of the paper pack, in line with the AVM machines.
In ‘77 Nolte incorporated the endeavor as Election Forms and Systems Corporation, and would continue the operation until 1980, when he sold it to Roberts & Son, one of his clients located in Birmingham, Ala. “It was a good time for me to get rid of it,” he says, laughing, “I tried for probably a year to find one of my printing customers that would take it over.”
His next step wouldn’t take him out of the business, however, and at the time Nolte remembers, “I decided that while I was doing the print packs that somebody ought to do a computerized ballot layout system.”
He went to work for Roberts & Son for a few years, helping the company computerize their manufacturing operations. Even though the computerized software wasn’t a commercial success, Nolte learned a great deal from the software developers. “I’m pretty good at learning from example,” he adds.
This is something he never gave up, either. He continued to follow technology’s importance in the workforce while he worked as a sales rep with Business Records Corp (BRC), a Dallas company that was buying up printing companies around the country that specialized in elections. BRC had purchased Roberts & Son when Phil Foster, the son from that company, invited Nolte to cover Florida as a sales rep. It was then that he was hit with another brilliant idea – designing a touch screen voting system.
He went into business with Foster and they hit the ground running. “We got to the point that we had a demonstratable unit,” he says, “I developed an application that worked as an active voting demonstration.” Nolte remembers giving the demonstration to the coordinator of voting and elections in Pulaski County at the time – “It was exciting to see the looks on their faces and how excited they got with this thing.”
Unfortunately things fell apart then, and he and Foster went their separate ways. Nolte then reincorporated in Arkansas under the same name – Election Resources Corporation. He kept the front end of the software, which worked with votomatic machines. He was able to get a large customer base in both Florida and Georgia before he connected with a guy named Ken Hazlett, who had developed a product called ETNET, an election tabulation network. “We integrated our products to the point that you operate with the ballot printing system and then go straight into the ETNET and the programming is done for you,” he says.
He had great success with that venture until the presidential election of 2000. While havoc was taking Florida by the teeth, he was in Ann Arbor, Mich., waiting for a flight home. He says, “I had gone from the early 70s to 1992, by getting my name in the paper one time in Pulaski County. … But for the next six weeks or so I spent all day, every day, on the telephone talking to the reporters from the New York Times, from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, even the Miami Herald. It was scary at first, … but then it became fun, because I had nothing to hide.”
Eventually, the whole thing smoothed over. And although some in the election business didn’t make it, Nolte came out alright, but he knew the future of the business was changing.
“Prior to 2000, my thought was we will probably continue supporting this market until we were ready to retire,” he explains. Luckily, he had entered into a five year strategic alliance with Sequoia Specific Systems in ’98 which eventually bought out his company in 2003. He continued some contract work for Sequoia and eventually was their VP of Software Development as well as their VP of Certifications.
After 2007, however, he was completely finished with his Sequoia work, and focused on helping Saline County with their elections.
To keep up with the pace of change, Nolte had gone back to UALR in the late ‘90s to learn about Microsoft Access. In 2009 he went back yet again to study more intricate systems, including databases.
During that year, Christian O’Neal of the Alumni Association got in touch with him, and before he knew it, Nolte was serving on the board of directors. He has since served two, three year terms, and is the immediate past Chair of the Scholarship Committee.
In his role as chair, he completely automated the scholarship system for the association, as well as helped them plan and budget the scholarships up until 2024. He modestly says, “I didn’t have to apply for the role or sell them on what I was going to do.
“Instead of offering a one-time scholarship … we now have the option for a scholarship commitment for as long as you go to school here,” he says. He loves being involved with the association and getting to interact with the students. “I really love meeting with these kids that are coming through here and ... thinking back to when I was in school,” he says.
In fact, he’s very behind the cause of giving back to his alma mater, so much so that his whole family has a lifetime membership whether they went to UALR or not. Now that’s dedication.
When not tinkering around with technology, Nolte is a beekeeper as well as Master Gardener. His current project is the Governor’s Mansion Vegetable Garden. He and his wife Diana love to travel and spend time with their five grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
