Washington State Election Security:

"Election security and integrity are critical to the foundations of a democracy. There are many opportunities for errors to occur in elections as even the best voting system can suffer from inaccuracies or tampering. Two of the easiest ways to ensure election security are to have a paper record of each vote, and to check the results by performing a post-election audit."

I'm pretty big on voting, and have donated sales of Acorn in the past to organizations that help folks get registered to vote. But of course it's not enough to just get people to vote, but we need to make sure that our votes are counted correctly.

That's where election auditing comes in. As programmers, we audit and look over our code to make sure it's doing what we think it is. We write little tests to make sure the output being produced is what we think we programmed it to be. And it isn't always, because we are humans and we make mistakes and that's just part of the process of coding.

I don't see elections as anything different, especially since these days everything is tabulated on computers written by programmers just like myself. Auditing the vote just makes sense, and is a non-partisan issue. Have you ever met a programmer that hasn't written a bug? Has that type of programmer ever existed?

And auditing is cheap as well. But even if it wasn't, what kind of a price can you put on democracy, every US citizen's birthright?

Kirstin Mueller, my wife, also feels strongly about voting and has recently setup the Washington State Election Security to help advocate post election audits. I obviously think it's a good idea, and I hope you'll contact your legislators to tell them the same thing.