IEEE WIE Event – An Engineer’s Exploration of Voting Technology

#WIE #voting

IEEE Boise Section is excited to host Professor Elisa Barney Smith, Professor and Associate Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Boise State University who will be presenting a virtual Seminar on

An Engineer’s Exploration of Voting Technology

17 Febuary 2021  |  10:30AM MST

After the 2000 election and the problem of “hanging chads,” Dr. Barney worked with colleagues to apply their expertise in document analysis to evaluate and expand the underlying technology needed to automatically read printed ballots in a multi-university research project funded by the National Science Foundation. The 2000 election led to the Help America Vote Act, which resulted in an almost universal conversion to paper ballots in the US. Still, in both the 2008 US Senate race in Minnesota and the 2020 presidential race, the reading of paper ballots is in the news. This talk will look at some of the issues with reading and counting ballots, both automatically and manually.