Board of Directors

Aaron Hamlin – President, Director [E-mail]
Washington, DC

Aaron is a licensed attorney. He received his J.D. from Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan. He has graduate degrees from Indiana University and Miami University in public health and educational psychology, respectively. Aaron went to Northern Kentucky University near where he grew up to earn his B.S. degree in psychology while minoring in mathematics.

Outside election systems, Aaron also enjoys chess, racquetball, and disc golf.

See Aaron’s articles, essays, and other work:

• Interview with Dr. Kenneth Arrow (CES Audio Interview)
• Interview with OWS’ TJ Frawls (CES Audio Interview)
• “Is Our Centuries-Old Ballot Out of Date?“ (The New Citizens Press)
• “Approval Voting: A Voice for Independents” (Independent Voter Network)
• “How I Came to Care About Voting Systems” (CES Article)

Jan Kok – Vice President, Director [E-mail]
Fort Collins, CO

Jan attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Colorado State University, and took graduate-level courses in Electrical Engineering and Robotics at CSU.

Jan has worked as a programmer and engineer for over 20 years. He developed computer aided design programs at Hewlett Packard. He also developed a tire pressure monitoring system trucks and trailers. He is inventor or co-inventor on seven patents related to computer aided design, computer architecture, and programming technique.

Jan has studied and advocated alternative voting methods since 2000. He invented a method to allow any voting machine to accept and count Score/Range Voting ballots. In 1995 he co-founded The Center for Range Voting with Warren D. Smith. In 1997 he was a member of the Colorado Voter Choice Task Force.  He also served as an election judge in the 2004 and 2010 general elections.

Andy Jennings – Chief Financial Officer, Director [E-mail]
Mesa, AZ

Andy was born and raised in Mesa, Arizona. He did his undergraduate work in mathematics at Arizona State University. Andy continued at Arizona State when in 2010 he completed his Ph.D. in mathematics. Given his strong interest in voting theory, Andy did his dissertation on the concepts of monotonicity and gaming in both ordinal- and cardinal-class voting systems. Andy continues to live near his roots in Mesa, Arizona. He is also the founder of Shoptivate.com, a software company that sells search solutions for e-commerce sites.

Eric Sanders – Parliamentarian, Director [E-mail]
New York, NY

Eric is a New York City-based playwright and producer who has been active in the voting reform movement since 2005. He joined the Center for Election Science as Parliamentarian in 2012.

See Eric’s articles on Big Think:

• “Why the Republicans Lost: A Failed Voting System in the Primaries Selects Less-Popular Candidates“
• “Bipolar Politics: The Beginning and End of the Two-Party System“
• “Approval Voting: The Future of Intelligent Elections“

Clay Shentrup – Secretary, Director [E-mail]
San Francisco, CA

Clay grew up in southeast Kansas and studied computer engineering at the University of Kansas. He works as a software engineer specializing in the Ruby on Rails web framework. Clay’s hobbies include playing the guitar and songwriting, and he counts Seattle grunge acts such as Pearl Jam and Soundgarden among his biggest influences. He also holds a great love for the game of table tennis. See Clay’s article on Big Think: “Taking the Fear Out of Voting.”

Co-founder

Warren D. Smith
Stony Brook, NY

Warren was born in Cleveland, OH. He is a mathematician, computer scientist, and general theoretical scientist. Warren graduated with degrees in mathematics and physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before age 20. He earned his Ph.D. in applied math from Princeton University four years later. Warren worked as a researcher for AT&T Bell Laboratories for two years and the NEC Research Institute for 12 years. Afterwards, he taught mathematics at Temple University.

Warren’s published and unpublished academic work is extensive. It includes being the first to show the non-algorithmicity of hydrodynamics and Newton’s laws, the algorithmicity of quantum mechanics, and the first to give the fundamental bounds on information flux and storage density. He also contributed to patents on optical computer memory and theoretical DNA computers (see NY Times). Warren has worked on voting theory for over a decade. He is the co-founder of The Center for Range Voting with Jan Kok. The website is one of the most extensive online resources on voting theory.

Contributing Member

Matt Lane
Los Angeles, CA

Matt earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from UCLA. Originally from San Francisco, Matt received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Princeton University, and first studied the mathematics of voting systems in a summer course at the Scuola Matematica Universitaria in Perugia, Italy.

When not studying math, Matt writes for Math Goes Pop!, a website founded in 2008 with the goal of exploring the (surprisingly varied) connections between mathematics and pop culture in the hope of enriching both. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his fiancée and a rotating group of moderately well-behaved foster cats. See Matt’s article on CNN‘s blog: “Why a Different Voting System Might Be Better.”