- 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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