February 6, 2006 at 08:06:09

Black Box Voting Alert: Vendor Nondisclosure req. block EVERYTHING

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By Black Box Voting, Posted by Joan Brunwasser (about the submitter) Page 4 of 4 page(s)

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- If the FEC standards requires that the ITA-examined and
vendor-supplied "penetration analysis" be submitted into escrow,
does the secretary of state have a duty to examine the penetration
analysis?

- If a secretary of state authorizes a state examiner to look at
the system, does the secretary of state have a duty to enable said
examiner to conduct an unfettered examination, review federal
testing lab reports, including vendor's "penetration analysis" and
any testing lab comments on it?

- If so, does the secretary of state have an obligation to obtain the
report of his own state examiner?

WHY WOULD A SECRETARY OF STATE HAVE THE CONTRACTOR
NEGOTIATE/SIGN THE NDA WITH THE VENDOR, RATHER THAN THE
SEC. STATE'S OFFICE?

If a nondisclosure is used at all, would not the correct party for
the nondisclosure agreement (NDA) be the secretary of state, with
the sec. state then invoking his own NDA on the state examiner?

In other words, it seems that a strange breach of duty may have
occurred in locations where state examiners were forced into
NDAs directly with vendors. Because the Secretary of State has
a fiduciary duty to the taxpayers to ensure that voting systems are
safe from manipulation, the examiner must be given free rein to
disclose any and all findings with the secretary of state.

Thus, any NDA should be between the secretary of state and the
vendor, with an employment or consultant's agreement executed
between the secretary of state and the examiner. It is the secretary
of state's duty to protect his own examiner from retaliation from
the vendor.

Instead, it appears, the secretaries of state have stepped aside,
have failed to provide examiners with the materials and access to
the voting system reasonably required to perform an examination,
have apparently failed to provide examiners with access to the
penetration analysis, have failed to protect examiners from legal
retaliation by the vendor, and therefore have failed to obtain the
necessary information to "ensure that the system is safe from
manipulation."

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