Simple Utah Mormon Politics

Election Day 2010 sure started out crappy for me, but I finally got to vote. Hopefully by the end of the day it will have turned out much better. Stay tuned all day long as I live-blog my experiences and feelings on Election Day 2010.

What would do if your child's teacher told your child "Don't believe everything your parents tell you."? Would you be angry? I was for a minute. But I decided to turn what should have been a teaching moment into...a teaching moment. Update 1/27/2009: See the teacher's cordial response below. That's why I wrote the letter below to my child's teacher. I asked some of my work colleagues what they would do if something like that happened to their child. They encouraged me to personally confront the teacher and give her "what for". I initially determined that I would seek such a confrontation. But the more I thought about it, I realized that such a confrontation would very likely cause me to miss a teaching moment as well. So for what it's worth, here's the letter. Dear Miss [Name Redacted]: I very much appreciate that you encourage your students to discuss political issues in class. It is healthy for students to understand that, just l...

Having worked in computers for my entire adult life, I am of the opinion that computers are not the means by which we can be confident that our elections are fair. There's been a lot of discussion in the opinion pages about electronic voting lately. Some think it's the best way to facilitate elections, while others are of the opinion that electronic voting is fraught with peril. I happen to belong to the second camp. Not only can computer voting be affected by fraud, things can also go wrong that no one even thought of, leaving people without a means of voting or people voting for the wrong candidate because the computer programmer(s) made a mistake. I ought to know; I'm a computer programmer. I've written voting systems, and I know how easy it would be to make a mistake in the program as well as to defraud the voters by manipulating the results. The only way to ensure confidence in our elections is to have paper balloting. It takes a lot more time to count the vot...