1. Describe your background as an Oregonian and the experiences you have had with the workings of government here in the state. How do those experiences, and your temperament, best qualify you to hold the position of Secretary of State? I was born in a Seattle bedroom community where I lived in a mobile home until moving to Salem to attend Willamette University, across from the Capitol. There I became involved in the local Green Party chapter as the founding secretary and co-chaired the Campus Green Party. I later became the State Party Secretary and a three-term State Coordinating Committee member. I'm now the most senior and youngest SCC member. My major activities in Salem were to support Ralph Nader, oppose endless wars and Measure 9, and campaign for Bill Burgess, Anna Braun, and Bill Smaldone. I became Secretary of the Agenda for a Livable Salem's offshoot, Citizens for Livable Communities, and managed the website while they were active. After Taylor was elected through the effort of some "knuckle-dragging neanderthals" awash with corporate money, I made a decision to leave Salem for the more modern climate of Portland, where it was better for small businesses. I now own a home with my wife, whom I met in my first week at Willamette and married in Salem. We now live in Portand's Grant Park / Alameda neighborhoods. I best qualify for the position of Secretary of State because I'm the only candidate untainted by corporate cash and PAC money. I'm also a senior software engineer with domain expertise in security auditing, high performance, high capacity supercomputer clustering, and spatial databases. Particularly, I work at the company that runs 90% of the mobile navigation market world-wide and to whom Google paid to power the first versions of its Google Maps software. I'm currently the principle spatial and relational compiler engineer. There are only a handful of experts in my domain, worldwide, which is uniquely relevant to state administration, including opening access to government and redistricting. Being 27 years old, I also represent the future of Oregon. People my age are in majority refusing allegiance to the two so-called "major" parties, who are astonishingly out of touch with future generations of Oregon's leaders. 2. What has motivated you to seek this position and what goals do you expect to accomplish? How will your approach to the position reflect both the letter and the spirit of the requirements? I seek this position because I grew tired of Democrats ignoring Preference Voting and Campaign Finance Reform, both enabled by voters, while preventing third party access to the ballot, particularly in two notable cases. First, the fiasco in 2004 with the wanton illegality surrounding Bradbury's successful bid to keep Ralph Nader off the ballot. Second, Bradbury's and Brown's successful, and under the radar, passing of HB2614 in 2005, which made getting an independent on the ballot virtually impossible. The two most important functions of the Secretary of State are elections and auditing. We can't just say, "Every vote must be counted." Rather, "Every vote must be meaningful." Our votes are meaningless without preference voting to eliminate spoiled elections and campaign finance reform to end legalized bribery. The two major parties gave us two wholly inadequate candidates: a stunningly unqualified Republican and an insidiously partisan Democrat. My Pacific Green principles of unfettered participation, strong protection of direct democracy and initiatives, and true, multi-partisan pluralism inform how I would execute the office.