Baltimore is like most governments in that it solicits bids on virtually everything from massive infrastructure projects to the mundane, like a bid that closed Monday for a contract to provide 500 fidget spinners and jump ropes for an unnamed city agency.

But there’s one thing Baltimore hasn’t sought bids on: a company to run its elections. For more than a decade, the city has awarded millions of dollars in no-bid contracts to a Florida company to do much of the work that falls under the Baltimore City Board of Elections’ purview.

No other jurisdiction in Maryland contracts out election work to the extent Baltimore does. In March, for at least the seventh straight election cycle, the city spending board, without questions as part of its routine agenda, approved a $1.7 million deal for McAfee Election Services to “administer” the primary and general elections. The company, according to its contract, organizes and prepares the elections warehouse, services voting machines and ballot scanners, sets up early voting sites, prepares the press room, helps count votes, oversees the main-ballot canvass and more. All at a rate of $104.50 an hour.

McAfee Election Services’ owner, founder and sole listed public employee is Sam McAfee, who ran the city’s election warehouse for a decade before resigning in 1996, after he was among several elections officials who were charged with illegally voting in the city while living in the suburbs. McAfee’s case was dismissed after he resigned, according to an online public records database; the court file has since been destroyed and records of it expunged from Maryland’s online court systems. Record of the case is preserved in a 1996 news brief printed in The Baltimore Sun.

Why does the city’s board of elections forgo the bidding process and give contracts to a company whose owner was charged with illegal voting, especially when other jurisdictions handle much of the same work in house? In their words, they don’t really have a choice.

“The elections are not anything that just any company can perform,” election officials wrote in a March memo to the Baltimore City Board of Estimates, the board that approves city spending, explaining the rationale for the no-bid contract. “This supplier has been a staple in the elections community and the administrator for of elections for Baltimore City for many years.”

Neither Sam McAfee or Baltimore Elections Director Armstead Jones returned messages and phone calls seeking an interview.

The revelation of the series of no-bid contracts to conduct city election work comes on the heels of a bill the Maryland General Assembly passed in the 2024 session that makes it easier to fire local election officials. Sponsored by Sen. Antonio Hayes, who represents Baltimore, the bill requires the state’s elections administrator to give annual performance evaluations of local election directors and mandates those directors to carry out their jobs in accordance with state law.

“This is the exact reason we need the state board administrator providing advice, guidance and evaluation to our local boards,” Hayes said in a phone interview about the contract and scope of work Baltimore has given to Sam McAfee’s company. “I’m a stickler for procurement, so to learn we’ve had the same contract for years, especially with that type of history, is in my opinion pure negligence.”

For years, Baltimore’s elections have been fodder for those seeking to criticize Jones’ management and handling of his duties, and every election cycle seems to offer new material.

In the 2020 primary, the state wiped clean preliminary results after a few hours of counting on election night because the reported totals were wildly off from expectations. Jones would later say he was “asleep” when the state made the decision to reset vote totals in the early morning hours. In 2022, elections workers misplaced flash drives from ballot machines, which delayed the reporting of results. In the 2024 primary, city officials overreported 590 votes. The error was later caught in an audit.

Hayes’ bill makes it easier for the city board to fire Jones if State Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis gives him an unfavorable performance review. DeMarinis declined to comment for this article and it’s unlikely the city would part ways with its elections chief so close to a presidential contest.

The idea of the city repeatedly awarding a no-bid contract for critically important election work to a company whose founder and owner resigned after being charged with illegal voting has given some officials and election observers pause. State Sen. Cheryl Kagan, a Montgomery County Democrat and vice chair of the committee Hayes’ bill came out of, said the contract’s scope was astonishing.

“Foisting off vitally important tasks with no competition seems really dangerous to the, at least, appearance of running great elections,” said Kagan, a longtime advocate of election transparency and best practices.

“Something smells funny that a long-term no-bid contract has existed for many many years. ... I wonder about the level of oversight and accountability,” she added. “Those are the two words that keep popping up for me. And especially in our elections we’ve got to make sure that people trust their quality.”

The practice of contracting out election services is not unheard of. Around the country, smaller jurisdictions, usually rural ones, regularly have to contract out certain tasks, usually to other government agencies, because the elections office is underfunded and either understaffed or unstaffed entirely, said Tammy Patrick, head of the nonprofit Election Center, which seeks to improve democracy.

It’s up to a community to determine what level of privatization they want in their elections, Patrick said. Even then, the buck stops with the elections official tasked with certifying the results, which in Baltimore’s case is Jones.

There’s no evidence to suggest Baltimore’s election results have been untrustworthy, but even the appearance of impropriety can raise concerns in a time when American democracy is under attack by partisan forces, said Roger Hartley, dean of the University of Baltimore College of Public Affairs. The easiest way for Baltimore to avoid those concerns in this particular case, he said, would be to not employ people who previously faced criminal allegations of election impropriety.

“That’s going to be ripe for sharks circling in the water here, I mean literally any normal person would raise questions about that,” Hartley said.

The city’s spending with McAfee Election Services has been questioned before. A 2013 report from Baltimore’s Bureau of the Budget and Management Research found the city’s administration of elections was not “cost effective.” The 2013 report included a series of recommendations, one of which was to renegotiate the contract with the company to determine if reduced costs were possible.

In a document outlining a proposed breakdown of costs in its most recent contract, Sam McAfee’s company suggested it would need $12,000 for travel to Baltimore for assisting with the manual audit of ballots the state requires after the elections. Sam McAfee has addresses listed in both Florida and Baltimore County.

Another line item for packing ballot bins, the process of ensuring each polling station would have correct ballots delivered to it, listed a cost upward of $36,000.

Kagan was skeptical about many of the line items.

“A high school student seeking SSL [Student Service Learning] hours could do that with just a little bit of supervision,” she said of the ballot bins.

Those who know Sam McAfee say he isn’t getting rich off of the deal. Former Maryland Secretary of State John Willis, now a professor at the University of Baltimore, has known McAfee since the 1990s. While he wasn’t aware of the illegal voting charge or his resignation, Willis said Sam McAfee was competent, diligent and had put in much “duty and service” to Baltimore and Maryland over the decades.

“I don’t see him driving around in a Rolls Royce,” Willis said.