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03.09

Still Bridging the Communications Gap Between Engineers and Policy-Makers

By Sarah Rovito

Greetings fellow IEEE members, engineers and policy-makers! My name is Sarah Rovito, and I will be taking over the Student’s Voice column. During the summer of 2007, IEEE sponsored my participation in the Washington Internships for Students of Engineering (WISE) program in Washington, D.C. I came to our nation’s capital nerdy, naïve, and passionate about electronic voting machines. Surely the problems in my native Cuyahoga County had to be caused by some glitch in computer hardware or software!

I spent the summer researching the impact of technology on elections. I learned that Americans in 2006 voted using five different kinds of technologies: paper ballots, lever machines, punch cards, optically-scanned ballots, and direct recording electronic (DRE) voting systems. I learned of the security vulnerabilities and reliability concerns present in computerized voting before concluding that the only way to make sure that every vote counts in the digital era is to mandate the use of voter-verified paper ballots. Going one step further, I learned that few standards exist to regulate electronic voting.

Besides uncovering paper as the only true way to ensure election integrity, the WISE program bestowed upon me invaluable knowledge of Congress and the influence (or lack thereof) of engineers on the policy process. Not only do we need more engineers as emphasized by Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat, we need more engineers taking an active role in politics and policy. We need to mitigate the “communication gap” that Patrick Meyer has written about so eloquently in past Student’s Voice columns.

The WISE program had a profound impact on me, and I decided to change my plans. Instead of heading for New England and full-time graduate school in engineering management, I stayed in Washington and accepted an engineering position in the national security arena. I also began to pursue a master’s degree in systems engineering at The George Washington University. I think that I have the best of both worlds — I get to do interesting, policy-impacting work by day and live the life of a college student by night.

I have continued my involvement with IEEE and IEEE-USA, and I am proud to report that my policy interests have broadened beyond electronic voting machines. I am particularly interested in the logistics behind developing a national high-speed rail network, the continued success of women in engineering, and the quality of engineering education in the United States. I plan to write about these topics as well as practical and policy issues of interest to new engineers. I am grateful for the opportunity to express my views on engineering and policy in this space and look forward to many more Student’s Voice columns.

Sarah Rovito is IEEE-USA Today’s Engineer Student’s Voice Editor and a graduate student at The George Washington University. Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.

Opinoins expressed are the author's.