Pakflatt and the United States presidential election: The Derry connection

The polling booths in that celebrated picture had a specific Derry connection, in that all were manufactured by local engineering company Pakflatt - as were many others used across the United States that day.

Founded in 1986 by Chartered Engineer Patrick Mc Gonagle, the Derry-based company has manufactured and distributed no less than 25,900 polling booths in 75 ‘forty foot’ containers, comprising approximately 600 tons of cargo to 1,200 counties across 48 American states.

With its assembly plant in Springtown Industrial Estate, Pakflatt is now the largest voting booth manufacturing facility in Europe – making a range of cutting-edge election equipment.

This unique Derry company now has around 475,000 voting ‘compartments’ in service around the globe, with the United States being a very significant market. But like all great companies, it did have a humble beginning.

While running his aluminium window systems business in March 1986, Patrick Mc Gonagle spotted an opportunity to re-invent the traditional ‘old world’ voting booth.

Until then, the wooden structure was every Returning Officer’s nightmare – hard to assemble – hard to disassemble and a very costly piece of equipment to store and transport.

Typical of every great inventor with sharp engineering skills, Patrick set about designing the first ever fully collapsible voting booth, replacing wood with aluminium.

After two years of fine-tuning, Patrick got his first big breakthrough when an order was placed for 100 units by a UK local authority. The fact that the booth could ‘pack flat’ was the inspiration behind the company’s name.

Twenty years later, in 2008, Pakflatt made an even bigger breakthrough – this time into the USA. From that defining moment, Pakflatt had become a truly global player.

Patrick McGonagle’s many inventions (the company has come a long way since the 1988 prototype) are evidenced by the number of trademark and patent certificates on display in the company’s head office.

What Patrick considered as a mere ‘sideline’ to his aluminium window business in 1988, is now recognised as a highly successful world-class international company, dominating the global election equipment market.

On a recent visit to the impressive manufacturing facility, I was able to observe the production line as it assembled a fascinating range of voting devices destined for the US election and the final day of reckoning on November 3.

The US has an interesting range of voting options to choose from - of which the Pakflatt Curbside Precinct has to be the most bizarre.

Traditionally, the State of California would permit ‘drive-by’ voting where, rather than posting their ballots, the voters could simply drop them into specially designed ballot boxes, chained to lampposts!

But in this ‘Covid-era’ election year, the Curbside Boxes are in big demand and many more states are following the Californian lead.

Pakflatt prides itself on the quality, integrity and dependability of all its products. Patrick Mc Gonagle accepts that he is a perfectionist at heart and he has good reason to be.

“The objective is to construct products that don’t come back from customers. The further away a product ‘failure’ happens, the more expensive it is to fix,” he says.

Attention to detail has certainly paid off as Pakflatt has not had a single ‘external quality failure’ across its distribution territories in over ten years.

The company has shipped over 5000 units of production on 384 pallets, loaded onto sixteen ‘forty foot’ containers, for this year’s election.

At the US distribution centre in Illinois, the cargo was transferred to Pakflatt’s exclusive US distributor, Inclusion Solutions, a company that greatly impressed Patrick because of its pioneering work on making the voting process much more accessible to those with disabilities.

In 2001, Pakflatt was invited by the Home Office to take part in a public competition to design a device that would enable the visually impaired to vote independently, in private and with dignity.

The Pakflatt design was the outright winner, leading to the launch of the TVD (tactile voting device), 45,000 of which went into service across 46,000 polling stations for the 2001 General Election.

The TVD has been adopted for almost every conceivable form of voting throughout the UK since then.

Although the Pakflatt supply chain draws from many parts of the globe, Patrick sources as much as possible from Derry and the north-west, with local companies such as Lermagh Graphics, Mc Ivor Plastics, transportation company B-Fast and Welditz from Carndonagh all playing an important part in the Pakflatt operation.

Patrick insists that Pakflatt is just a small family business and is run like a small family business, with a strong culture of support and welfare for all its staff and work colleagues. The fact that most of his staff have been with the company for most of their working lives tells its own story.

A small family business, maybe, but this company is unquestionably one of Derry’s biggest success stories in its own right and very soon its products will become ‘centre-stage’ in the world’s most famous electoral contest.

As a certain Northern Ireland industry expert recently commented: “Pakflatt is the jewel in the crown of Derry’s indigenous manufacturing sector and its owner is one of our economy’s finest ambassadors.”