IEEE Central Coast Holiday Banquet – 5 Dec @ 6:30 – 9:00 PM

At Mulligans Café Santa Barbara Golf Club (3500 McCaw Ave)

Greetings, You (and guest) are invited to a FREE Holiday Banquet. Please Register for Event (bottom of page) and select your entree Prime Rib or Salmon or Vegetarian. Event speaker is Dr. Behrooz Parhami of UCSB.

Happy Holidays, Ruth Franklin IEEE Central Coast Chair

The Science and Engineering Behind Democratic Elections

Abstract: We tend to think of voting as conceptually simple: Isn’t it just casting ballots and counting them? This is true when there are only two candidates, in which case the sole possible complication is tie votes. As soon as we have more than two candidates, complications arise, which have been subjects of intense studies by mathematicians, computer scientists, and economists. Kenneth Arrow won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics by proving an impossibility theorem for voting: That if we require the satisfaction of four axioms, all of which are quite reasonable, then there does not exist a voting system that satisfies all four of them. No matter how hard we try, and how much complexity we introduce into our voting system, there are instances where it fails to reflect the will of the people in a reasonable and fair way. I will show several examples where our commonly-used plurality voting system has yielded inappropriate outcomes and point to two important causes: Vote splitting and spoiler candidates. I will also show several alternative voting schemes (approval voting, Borda voting, and ranked-choice voting) that avoid some of the difficulty, although we know from Arrow’s and other impossibility theorems that these alternate schemes must also fail in some cases. So, there is no perfect “error-free” voting system, but we can devise systems with fewer problematic cases. The engineering behind elections includes the design of machines and processes that ensure efficient and smooth counting, oversight, and certification. I will conclude my discussion by pointing to the difficult problem of districting and an abomination known as Gerrymandering.

Speaker Bio: Behrooz Parhami (PhD, UCLA 1973) is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and former Associate Dean for Academic Personnel, College of Engineering, at University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches and does research in computer arithmetic, parallel processing, and dependable computing. He is currently serving a second 3-year term as an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor. A Life Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of IET and British Computer Society, and recipient of several other awards (including a most-cited paper award from J. Parallel & Distributed Computing), he has written six textbooks and more than 300 peer-reviewed technical papers. He serves on journal editorial boards & conference program committees, is passionate about puzzles, outreach efforts, & gender equity, and is active in technical consulting.

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Register for Event: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/event/register/447620