Competence over politics.
Modern systems. Better service.
The Pierce County Auditor runs elections, recording, and licensing for the second-largest county in Washington, nearly a million residents and roughly 600,000 registered voters. The job is operations, and it deserves an operations professional. I served as Pierce County's Elections Supervisor for five years, and was Interim Elections Manager in Clallam and Cowlitz counties during the 2020 presidential election. I have spent two decades managing telecommunications networks and twenty-four-hour critical systems. I have built and modernized the systems this office runs on. I am ready to expand that work to recording and licensing.
When government offices are run well, citizens feel it every day, and most of the time, do not notice. That is the goal.
Born in Puyallup. Raised between Roy and east Tacoma. Found my spouse in Eatonville. Now in the Gig Harbor area. Pierce County is where I live, where I work, and where I have run elections.
Pierce County Elections Supervisor, 2014 to 2019. Interim Elections Manager in Clallam and Cowlitz counties during the 2020 presidential election. Trainer and subject matter expert for the Washington Secretary of State on voter registration. Helped earn the office two Clearie Awards for elections efficiency. Ballots, audits, certification, signature verification. I have done the work before running for the office.
Network Operations Supervisor at Lightcurve. Two decades managing high-tech infrastructure: telecommunications, data networking, incident response, and twenty-four-hour critical systems. LEAN Green Belt with hands-on experience in process management and continuous improvement. The Auditor's Office is an operations job. I have been an operations professional my entire career.
The Auditor's Office is nonpartisan by Pierce County charter. I am a proud Cascade Party member, and the Cascade Party is a partial bridge between the two major parties. I will not claim nonpartisanship in public while quietly belonging to a major party in private. As your Auditor, I will act as a referee and an impartial operator of elections.
Most voters do not know. And the answer is not what you might assume from the name.
Pierce County is a charter county. Our charter, adopted in 1980, sets the duties of the elected Auditor by local choice, not state default. In 2007, voters amended the charter to make the Auditor a nonpartisan position. They were right. As a result, the Pierce County Auditor does not handle general county accounting or financial auditing. Those functions are split among the Executive, the Assessor-Treasurer, and the State Auditor's office. The Pierce County Auditor runs operations:
About 65 full-time staff and 200 to 300 seasonal election workers. Biennial budget of $28 million. The Auditor sets what gets measured, what gets prioritized, and how the public is treated.
The Auditor's job is operations, not advocacy.
In nearly every county in Washington, the Auditor is promoted from inside the office. There is a reason. The role is technical: election law, recording, licensing, vendor compliance, staff workflow. It is not a legislative seat. When the role is filled by someone whose background is in politics rather than operations, the office is at a disadvantage from day one, and the public eventually pays for it.
When I started as Pierce County's Elections Supervisor, we were processing ballots on the same equipment that had been installed when I was in high school in 1994. I led the modernization of our tabulation system and developed the procedures that came with it. The majority of Washington counties now use that system and the workflows we built at Pierce County. I have done the hard work of leaning and modernizing the elections function. I want to bring the same discipline to the licensing and recording sides of the office.
Most candidates for this office come from one of two backgrounds: elections experience, or technology experience. I have both. Five years inside Pierce County's elections office. Two decades managing telecommunications networks and critical systems. The Auditor's job needs both backgrounds, and the public deserves both. Combined, they produce three things the office needs: stronger security, more transparency, and lower cost.
Elections security is a network and operations problem first. Defense in depth, incident response discipline, audit trails, and the engineering instinct to assume failure and design for it. That is what I do for a living.
Public dashboards that show what the office is actually doing. Plain-English reporting. Open data on processing times, signature acceptance rates, and ballot performance. Voters should not need a records request to see how things are running.
Modernized workflows take work out of the system, not staff out of jobs. Better digital intake, fewer paper handoffs, smarter use of AI as a tool for staff rather than a replacement for accountability. The savings come from process, not headcount.
Secure systems, auditable processes, public confidence. Defended by turnout, accuracy, and audit performance, not by partisan framing.
Shorter wait times for licensing, passports, and recording. Modern scheduling that actually works. Honest communication when something goes wrong, instead of a phone tree.
Better digital workflows. Reduced redundancy. Responsible evaluation of emerging tools including AI. Resiliency planning that anticipates failure instead of reacting to it.
Live dashboards for licensing wait times, recording turnaround, and elections performance. Annual reporting written for people, not policy committees. Honest answers when the numbers are not what we want them to be.
Equal service whether you live in downtown Tacoma, out on Key Peninsula, in Eatonville, in Buckley, or all the way out to Greenwater. Better remote access to recording and licensing. Auditor's office services traveling to remote communities. Geography should not limit responsiveness.
This campaign is about how the office operates day to day, every day. Not the one election cycle every two years. Damon Townsend
In February of 2026 I started the Peninsula County Exploratory Committee. People sometimes ask me why I am also running for Pierce County Auditor.
Honest answer. They are two responses to the same problem.
Communities west of the Narrows, on the Key Peninsula, on Anderson, Fox, McNeil, and the other islands, and across rural Pierce County have real grievances about response times, services, and representation. Those grievances are not invented and they are not partisan. They come from geography, distance, and a county government centered in Tacoma.
There are two lawful paths forward. One is to form a new county, the route Pend Oreille County voters took in 1911. The other is to reform the existing one. I am working on both, because I want the outcome more than I care about the structure that delivers it.
If I am elected Pierce County Auditor, peninsula and rural residents will have someone in the executive branch who knows the geography, knows the people, and treats remote access to county services as a first-order problem, not an afterthought. That is true whether the boundaries change someday or not.
The Cascade Party is a bona fide party in the state of Washington, founded for Washingtonians tired of the constant manufactured outrage of national politics. Members vote on the platform and bylaws directly, not through a national committee. We believe there is a bridge to better between the extremes of the two major parties.
The party's motto is Live your best life. Practical solutions, efficient government, governance built locally that helps people get on with their lives.
I serve on the party's board, and I am transparent about that. I do not hide my party affiliation like other candidates running for nonpartisan offices do. The people of Pierce County deserve to know what we stand for, so please check us out at cascadeparty.org.
The party has formally endorsed this campaign, see endorsements.
Talk to neighbors. Donate if you can. Local races are decided by hundreds of votes, not millions.
Yard signs, postage, printing. The unglamorous necessities of a down-ballot race. Pierce County contribution limits apply.
Contribute by mail Donate online (coming soon)Ask a question, propose a meeting, share a concern, or volunteer your time. Damon reads campaign mail and returns it directly.
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The design is intentional. Red on one side, blue on the other, white between them. An independent in the gap that the two major parties leave behind. If you have lawn space and want a sign, email me. I will get one to you.
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