Dr. Laura Albert: On Designing and Operating Resilient Voting Systems

Democracies rely on the ability of the public to vote on key issues pressing their society. Election voting systems are defined by complex inter-related processes, and design decisions made by election officials have been shown to influence voter participation. The elections held during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the vulnerability of our nation’s voting systems to disruptive events. Unforeseen disruptions require election officials to quickly respond to changing election conditions and redesign the voting system. This motivates the need for analytical tools to help election officials design systems that perform well under a range of election conditions and to help develop contingency plans to use in response to an election disruption. However, there is a lack of literature addressing these crucial needs. In her talk, Dr. Albert will explore analytics-based election practices that can ensure that election voting systems are safe, reliable, and equitable. 

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Laura Albert, Ph.D., is a professor and the David Gustafson department dhair of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests are in the field of operations research, with a particular focus on discrete optimization with application to homeland security and emergency response problems.

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