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.

Hood says because of the logistics involved in delivering thousands of machines to polls, Office Movers has possession of the machines for hours at a time.

"Anything could be done," he says. "You could take a whole truck of machines and drive it into the warehouse, and drive another truck out. So a lot of things could happen. But there is no security in the process of deploying voting machines. Absolutely no security."

Since the company picks up machines from polling places after elections, it means the company has possession of machines that fail or otherwise perform irregularly during the election or that might later be involved in recounts. In a tight election, that arrangement could cast a shadow on any postelection troubleshooting or recount.

Ross Goldstein, deputy administrator with the Maryland state Board of Elections, says he was aware of Kane's political connections, but that he's not concerned about them because the voting machines are secure.

"These machines are locked, sealed, tamper-taped," he says. "There are very strict protocols that the drivers follow. I think it's a little far-fetched to assume that he's going to have drivers that are in cahoots. There are enough other security procedures involved with the seals that I don't think it's an issue."

Mike Morrill, spokesman for Diebold/Premier, says that Office Movers is a natural choice for delivering its machines, because the company has had contracts with various government agencies and local boards of elections going back many years.

"We've all found them to perform very well, which is why we looked at them again this year," he says.

As for Kane's political connections, Morrill says he thinks Hood probably misunderstood what he heard on that 2004 conference call. It would have been silly for Diebold to try to keep its deal with Kane's company quiet, because Diebold provides each county with a report naming the company that will deliver its machines, and gives the same information to the state Board of Elections.

Although he says he was not aware that Kane was on the steering committee for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, he says that Kane's and his wife's political affiliations are well-known and irrelevant, since they're part of Kane's personal life, and his company has never been accused of political wrongdoing. Morrill adds that if Diebold/Premier screened out companies involved in political activity of one type or another in Maryland, it would have trouble finding anyone.

"You assume somehow that all of the people who work for him would share (his political) perspective," Morrill says. "I don't think you can assume that someone who engages in political activity on a personal level would then use their corporation to serve that purpose."

Kane notes that his company has been delivering voting machines in the state for 38 years and that Office Movers withdrew from its contract to deliver voting machines in 2006 while he was chairman of the state Republican Party "out of fear of any conflict of interest being raised."

"It was my desire not to be a story line," he says. "I didn't want to have a cartoon in The Baltimore Sun with me in the back of a truck with a screwdriver saying, 'Chairman Kane delivers the vote.'"

That conflict-of-interest fear, however, didn't prevent the company from bidding on the contract in the first place. The company's withdrawal three months before the primary raised criticism at the time from Maryland's Democratic Party, which believed that Kane was trying to disrupt the election and suppress the vote by creating chaos that would discourage voters from voting. Vote suppression is generally viewed as a tactic that benefits Republican candidates.

Kane says that was never his motivation for canceling the contract and that he hadn't been aware until after the contract was signed that his company was planning to deliver the voting machines that year.

He adds he has never had any personal contact with Diebold/Premier, and says he doesn't even know the value of the delivery contract, though he thinks it might be around half a million dollars.

The Kane Company, which owns a number of other shipping companies in addition to Office Movers, makes $7 million a month in revenue, according to Kane.

David Paulson, spokesman for Maryland's Democratic Party, says that Kane's affiliations with the Republican Party and Romney's campaign are a concern but doesn't think they should prevent the company from having the delivery contract.

"It concerns me that an individual with heavy political ties to the Republican Party and to Mitt Romney is associated or involved in any way in the electoral process in a way that could be disruptive if one chose to be," he says, "But there's never been a hint, beside that breaking of the contract in 2006, of manipulation or otherwise nefarious activity on behalf of Office Movers."

He says he believes Kane is "an honest person" and wouldn't "do something illegal or unethical in service of a contract like this."

But he also says that because Democrats control local boards of elections across the state, he expects that "these contracts and this delivery service will be closely watched and monitored to ensure that nothing untoward occurs."