Of course there's no election fraud here: In MD, former head of state Republicon party owns trucking company that delivers Diebold voting machines to 14 counties
- From: "Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names" <PopUlist349@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2008 18:32:38 -0800 (PST)
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.
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2008/01/john_kane/
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