RNC General Counsel Declines Opportunity to Inspect Voting Machine Source Code

The RNC General Counsel, Michael Whatley, has served as Chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party since 2019. For more than 5 years, Michael Whatley has possessed the authority to appoint three individuals with the qualifications to fully inspect every aspect of the voting machines used in 78,214 precincts in 42 states and territories; to provide hard, irrefutable evidence of machine vulnerabilities and/or voting fraud, or to debunk those concerns (at least in part) for some of the ES&S and Heart InterCivic machines. Yet, he has refused to do so.

North Carolina law requires every voting system vendor to place its source code in escrow with an independent escrow agent.

§ 163-165.9A. Voting systems: requirements for voting systems vendors; penalties.

(a) Duties of Vendor. – Every vendor that has a contract to provide a voting system in North Carolina shall do all of the following: (1) The vendor shall place in escrow with an independent escrow agent approved by the State Board of Elections all software that is relevant to functionality, setup, configuration, and operation of the voting system, including, but not limited to, a complete copy of the source and executable code, build scripts, object libraries, application program interfaces, and complete documentation of all aspects of the system including, but not limited to, compiling instructions, design documentation, technical documentation, user documentation, hardware and software specifications, drawings, records, and data. The State Board of Elections may require in its request for proposal that additional items be escrowed, and if any vendor that agrees in a contract to escrow additional items, those items shall be subject to the provisions of this section. The documentation shall include a list of programmers responsible for creating the software and a sworn affidavit that the source code includes all relevant program statements in low-level and high-level languages.

(2) The vendor shall notify the State Board of Elections of any change in any item required to be escrowed by subdivision (1) of this subsection.

(3) The chief executive officer of the vendor shall sign a sworn affidavit that the source code and other material in escrow is the same being used in its voting systems in this State. The chief executive officer shall ensure that the statement is true on a continuing basis.

Further, the State chairs of each political party has the right to designate up to three person’s to review and examine all of the information placed in escrow.

§ 163-165.7.(f).9.d The State chairs of each political party recognized under G.S. 163-96 may… designate up to three persons as that person's agents to review and examine the information. No person shall designate under this subdivision a business competitor of the vendor whose proprietary information is being reviewed and examined. For purposes of this review and examination, any designees under this subdivision and the State party chairs shall be treated as public officials under G.S. 132-2.

The NC Board of Elections provides a list of approved vendors and voting machines for counties to choose from. Eight different machines from two different vendors are used across North Carolina’s 100 counties: ES&S ExpressVote, ES&S AutoMARK, ES&S DS200, ES&S DS450, ES&S DS850, ES&S Model 650, Hart InterCivic Verity Central, and Hart InterCivic Verity Scan.

According to Verified Voting¹ , the same machines are used across 42 states and territories, in 78,214 precincts, with 106,126,558 registered voters.

1. https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#mode/navigate/map/ppEquip/mapType/normal/year/2024