LISLE, Illinois (CNN) -- What does it cost to rent a 12-foot Ryder truck to go from West Palm Beach to Tallahassee, Florida?
Just a penny -- if 462,000 presidential ballots are the freight and the trip is broadcast on national television.
That was the price charged the Palm Beach County Board of Elections, said Allison
Striegel, a spokeswoman for Budget Group, which owns Ryder Truck Rental Services,
Normally, the cost of the rental would have been about $230 for the one-way, 450-mile trip, she said.
County officials said the ballots were not flown to Tallahassee because
the cases weighed thousands of pounds. They said there are no direct
commercial flights anyway, and any flight would have taken at least five hours.
Ryder picked truck carefully
To minimize the odds that Ryder's eight hours of fame would backfire, the
1999 Ford F-350 that was picked up from Embry's Truck Rental in West Palm Beach with 30,407 miles on it had just undergone an "all-points inspection."
The ballots fit within the truck's 710-cubic-foot cargo area and were
protected from the elements by walls of inch-thick, reinforced fiberglass.
The cab, which accommodates a driver and one passenger, had air-conditioning and an AM/FM player, but no tape player or CD.
It is not unusual for the company to donate its trucks. "We do it most
typically on a philanthropic basis," Striegel said. "We're very active in natural
disasters, moving supplies in and out of disaster locations."
"We were honored that we were chosen," Striegel said. "We thought that
reflected well on the reliability and the quality and the safety of the brand."
Budget Truck Group was recently chosen by the U.S. government to provide
all the truck rental services to the federal government and their service agencies, she said.
Ryder's fleet consists of about 46,000 trucks.
![[CNN Money]](http://i.cnn.net/cnn/images/main/fn.logo.newsnet.gif){kind=logo}
![[SI.com]](http://i.cnn.net/cnn/images/main/si.logo.gif){kind=logo}
(
