Name: Seth Woolley Position: Oregon Secretary of State Party: Pacific Green Residence: Portland, OR How long in district: Since 1999, minus 18 months in Silicon Valley Occupation/employer deCarta, Inc., Senior Software Engineer Family: Rickie Woolley, Spouse Education: Willamette University, Computer Science Major Employment and military: Senior Software Engineer, Spatial Database Technology public offices elected: none unsuccessful candidacies: none other civic/political/government experience: [code] Pacific Green Party of Oregon: 2008 Nominated Canidate for Secretary of State of Oregon 2008 Oregon Delegate to the Pres. Nominating Nat. Convention 2008-now Appointed Secretary 2008 Elections Administrator 2007-now State Parliamentarian 2005-2006 Joe Keating Webmast. 2003-2005 Appointed Secretary 2004-2005 Elected Fin. Coord. 2004 Teresa Keane Webmast. 2003-2004 Elected Comm. Coord. 2003-2005 Database Consultant 2003-2004 Elections Administrator 2004 Oregon Delegate to the Pres. Nominating Nat. Convention Marion-Polk Green Party (PGP chapter): 2000-2004 Elected Secretary Citizens for Livable Communities: 2003-2004 Elected Secretary 2002-2005 Webmaster Willamette University Socialist Union/Campus Greens: 2001 Co-Chair [/code] Contact: 3403 NE Stanton St, Portland, OR 97212 seth@seth4sos.org 503-953-3943 http://seth4sos.org/ major endorsements: none yet convictions/professional discipline: never bankruptcy/tax delinquency/sued for not paying: never Three closest advisors: Rickie Woolley (wife), Blair Bobier (Pacific Party founder), James Nicita (Green Party of Michigan founder, now in Oregon City) Why endorse: I'm the only candidate not bought and paid for by special interests. There's a saying, "Nobody got fired for buying IBM". Endorsing Kate or Rick is like buying IBM. If you believe in election reform or campaign finance reform, an endorsement would go a long way toward holding either candidate accountable to those issues, in particular, the Democrat, who is likely to win anyways. experiences that prepared you for this office: I'm the only candidate that I can tell has the following experience: deep geospatial database experience (I write the core engine code) -- think redistricting in a fair manner computer automation and website experience (consulting and employed) -- think opening up government to deep accessibility to the media election administration experience (minor party elections are not public-run) -- Instant Runoff Voting and other advanced election methods. auditing experience (security consulting) -- again, opening up government to have public performance audits non-profit board experience (e.g. Salem CLC, Source Mage GNU/Linux) -- the job includes managing policies for large state departments provided leadership: After two coworkers left my startup, nobody with any expertise was left to manage a key component of the core technology for my employer. Despite being the youngest engineer without as much experience as most engineers in the R&D department, I volunteered to take ownership of said key component (I can't get into too much detail for NDA reasons), rewrote a major part of that component against deadlines to improve performance enough to ship the product in an 8 figure deal. They trusted me because I had already successfully tackled a major research project to compress the spatial data to fit onto a tiny flash card. I was given a major promotion and went on to rearchitect the data format for the next major version of the product. bipartisanism: I don't work in a bipartisan fashion, but a multi-partisan fashion. I often end up facilitating meetings of the Pacific Green Party, which can be a literal mess of ideas. The Pacific Green Party actually shuns Robert's Rules of Order and uses the Quaker-inspired Consensus Process. The point of facilitation instead of "chairing" a meeting is to coalesce ideas into a cohesive, more consensus-derived whole. When people oppose an idea, they are free to express their concerns and the facilitator tries to integrate the ideas into a plan that works for everybody. The goal of the consensus process is to actually seek 100% consensus. The Party does use a modified version, where you seek consensus at least twice and then fall back to a majority vote because in some cases true contradictions may exist. When the goal is consensus, you often get ideas that are even true alternatives to real contradictions. One example of an apparent contradiction is HB2614, which I've been working to repeal as part of my campaign. The proposal was put forward in the name of ensuring that independents don't get the right to nominate more than one candidate for office. The whole purpose was flawed (non-affiliated voters are not a party, so should not be treated as a single association). The true motive was to keep independents off the ballot by making it many times harder to get on the ballot and to prevent a party's membership from defecting to an "independent" who's really just dissatisfied with their "original" party's corruption. While I think the entire bill is faulted (members of a party should be able to defect to keep the party honest), the major problem, regardless of the partisan issues, is that true independents are killed in the crossfire. True independents may have broad appeal across all parties, and those that do are unfairly penalized. To make up for that fact, the signature counts should be reduced or a primary for independents should be created to make getting independents on the ballot. I've put a compromise proposal forth to reduce the signature count required. That would correct the bill to not hurt true independents but not advantage candidates that aren't merely attempting to attack a party from outside, which is likely the main impediment to direct repeal. rate incumbent: This is an open office, but the existing Democrat would get a D. Bill Bradbury has nothing significant to his credit while in office. He used the office to run for governor later. He's a member of the DLC, which is an organization setup by Republican Democrats to move the entire party to the right on economic issues. He only doesn't get an F because he's been so ineffectual that he's been criticized by unions for not going after Sizemore more. The region's demographics have been moving Democratic for some time and the youth registration has gone up, too. I intend to push youthful energy and ideas into the debate to help modernize the future of Oregon's elections, to be more democratic, to distribute power to more Oregonians by providing voices to more people than just the two, old, major parties. Five issues: Campaign Finance Reform: I'd push to ban all payment per signature for initiatives and I would implement Measure 47 because every initiative must be enforced unless it's been enjoined or struck down. I would push for initiative primaries. Independent Ballot Access: I've described above what I'd do for independent ballot access, first in at least an enhancement to HB2614 and second with a non-affiliated approval-based primary. Ranked Voting: I would work to start the process with county clerks to implement Instant Runoff Voting, first not opposing the local option and second to work to implement it state-wide, starting with the state-wide elections. If Measure 65 is passed, I would work to modify it to instead of being top two, to eliminating primaries altogether and having an IRV single general election, which would fix it to be fair to third parties and independents. Redistricting: We need to make redistricting neutral by being extremely open about how the boundaries will be re-drawn. With my spatial database expertise, I would implement ORS 188.010 algorithmically and invite computer scientists and political scientists to assist in making a system that is fair to everybody and compliant with the law. Open Auditing of Government and Elections: First, we need to open up performance auditing to the public by heeding the advice of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy to standardize our financial reporting into open formats, frequently updated, and modernized. Second, we need to ensure our election software and hardware is fully public, open source and open hardware, to avoid trade secrets from being any part of the functioning of our democracy. Statistical sampling of elections should be increased as well. Issues no compromise: I would never compromise on being fair and open in how I administered the office. I would never compromise on preventing the parties from benefitting due to redistricting. It would be illegal to compromise in this manner. I would never compromise on reducing the influence of money in politics. Issues compromise: Instant Runoff Voting needs to be gradually rolled out, starting at the local level and expanded county by county with input from the county clerks. Independent access to the ballot has a number of issues as I addressed above that need compromise proposals. The exact method of campaign finance reform should be discussed. Measure 47 is a good start, but it might have provisions struck down. Voters might want to have another chance at Measure 46. Public financing might be a way forward. Brown wants to consider looking at the political tax credit. The Green Party gets half its donations from that, so I would be wary of eliminating it, but I would consider modifications, particularly better oversight and tracking. Two innovative ideas: I'd like to think my ideas aren't all that innovative because most have been already very well studied. Most of my issues are not a part of the two party debate, though, so if that was the criteria, I would say, first, opening up access to government electronically, and second, using computer automation to drive redistricting in an unbiased fashion in full, unquestionable compliance with the law. Promoting IRV is certainly not mainstream yet, either. Probably my most innovative idea is my Forests Fund to gradually ween the Common Schools Fund from extractive revenue sources. Raising a community: Weening our land board off of timber revenues will have a long-term positive effect for our children. I believe any increase in democracy, as I support, helps the future of our children by enfranchising everybody in our future generations. Effective constituent service: Increased openness and public access, more and more online, will increase the office's efficiency. Open auditing will allow constituents to see more into how every operation of government works. Allowing voters to rank their votes will allow everybody to feel their vote MEANINGFULLY counts. The only constituents that might not like what I do are large monied interests and those who disagree with the precepts of democratic society. Skeletons: Pavel Goberman endorsed me. :) I was chair of the Willamette Socialist Union. I'm an unashamed atheist. Support Measures 54-56, oppose 57-65