GOP Figure Contracted to Deliver E-Voting Machines in Maryland

A family-owned trucking firm that has a contract to deliver Diebold electronic voting machines to 14 voting districts in Maryland is headed by the former chairman of Maryland's Republican party, Wired News has learned.

Office Movers, which is owned by The Kane Company in Elkridge, Maryland, received the contract from Diebold Election Systems to transport the company's machines from warehouses to the polls for the state's Feb. 12 primary and November general election.

John M. Kane, president and CEO of The Kane Company, was chairman of the Maryland Republican Party from the end of 2002 until December 2006. He is also a member of the statewide steering committee for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. According to one news report, Kane has been tasked since last month with raising money for Romney in Maryland, a Democratic stronghold. His wife is a delegate on the Republican primary ballot for Romney rival Rudy Giuliani.

Even in this tumultuous election season, the company's political affiliations might not raise conflict-of-interest questions were it delivering old-fashioned voting machines. But the Diebold touch-screen voting machines used in Maryland produce no paper trail and have experienced glitches that have invited close scrutiny after previous elections. A report compiled by the elections office in Montgomery County, Maryland, (immediately northwest of the District of Columbia) after the 2004 presidential election revealed that 189 machines (7 percent) there failed on election day. Of these machines, 58 wouldn't boot up and were taken out of service, and another 106 experienced frozen screens. Other counties have experienced problems with the machines as well.

Local voting-integrity activists were surprised to hear of Office Movers' deal with Diebold (now known as Premier Election Solutions), and they worry that the integrity of elections is at risk if machines are transported by a company whose owner is so closely aligned with a party and candidate.

"What concerns us the most is that there is a chain-of-custody issue here," says Mary Kiraly of the Maryland Election Integrity Coalition, an umbrella group of five organizations, including the Maryland branches of Common Cause and the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Twenty thousand voting units leave the custody of Board of Elections officials, and they are placed in the hands of a third-party private company responsible, not to the state Board of Elections, but to the vendor," Kiraly says. "How was this company chosen, and who vetted the employees who handle and deliver these vulnerable voting units?"

According to Maryland's statewide contract with Diebold, which the state signed in 2003 for $55.6 million, the vendor is responsible for providing secure storage and transport of its voting machines. Although the machines are stored in county warehouses, private companies are subcontracted by Diebold to transport the machines from the warehouses to polls and back again at the end of the election.

Reached by phone, Kane acknowledges some irony in his company delivering the voting machines, but says there's no conflict of interest since he's no longer head of the state Republican Party and isn't currently involved in it. Although The Baltimore Sun reported last month that Kane would be raising money for Romney, he says his position on Romney's presidential steering committee is purely ceremonial and that he's done no fundraising except for his own $2,000 contribution.

"They just wanted the former chairman's name (on the committee) to show that (Romney) had gravitas in the state," he says.

Office Movers is contracted to deliver machines in 14 of the state's 24 voting districts this year, including Montgomery County -- Maryland's most populous. Four other private companies will deliver in the remainder of the state. A fifth company, Signature Space, is contracted to serve as project manager, responsible for the logistics of all the deliveries of the companies.

Office Movers also delivered Diebold machines in the 2004 election cycle, when it was contracted to deliver machines to eight Maryland counties during that year's general election, and to an unknown number during the primary. It was hired by Diebold indirectly that year through a subcontractor commissioned to manage the deliveries and pick other contractors to deliver the machines.

According to a contractor who worked for Diebold at the time, when the subcontractor picked Office Movers for part of the project, Diebold wanted to keep the information confidential, because of Kane's relationship with the Republican Party.

"They didn't want to have any political blowback (from the contract)," says Chris Hood, who worked as a Diebold contractor from 2001 to 2004 producing voter-education materials. Hood recalled a 2004 conference call with Diebold officials in which Tom Feehan, Diebold's project manager for Maryland, told participants that the contract with Office Movers had been signed, but that they needed to keep the news under wraps.

Diebold had run headfirst into a firestorm of controversy in 2003 when it was discovered that CEO Walden O'Dell had sent a fundraising invitation to wealthy Republicans in Ohio saying that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes" to President Bush in 2004.