Election activism
In the aftermath of the 2004 election, O'Dell
co-founded US Count Votes, a volunteer scientific research project to investigate the integrity and accuracy of American elections. He is currently affiliated with the Election Defense Alliance, a non-profit organization working to achieve transparent, secure, and accurate elections. Recently he helped EDA develop
a novel election audit protocol and co-authored a paper on the 2006 election exit poll discrepancies. He opposes electronic voting in any form, and believes citizen-run elections using hand-counted paper ballots
are the best method to restore public faith in the electoral process.
Professional achievements
In the early 1980s O'Dell started his career at
Control Data Corporation in research and development of artificial intelligence and robot vision systems, but most of his
career has been spent in the financial services industry.
He is familiar with the design and operation of
very large-scale computer systems with stringent security, audit, and accountability requirements, such as loan servicing,
bond trading, and stock trading. He had leading roles in large-scale e-commerce and security projects while employed by American
Express and by the finance arm of General Motors. At American Express he led the team designing a company-wide security service,
and received their Chairman's Award for Quality, in 1998, for helping to define methods for securely deploying new software
to networks of thousands of computers. As a Principal Consultant at Computer
Sciences Corporation one of his system designs was nominated for a national technical quality award.
His current consulting practice centers on e-commerce
security and the performance and design of very large-scale computer systems for Fortune 100 clients. He recently spent a
year as the chief technical architect in a company-wide security project at one of the top twenty public companies in America,
and helped to design a bond underwriting application that will process trillions of dollars of mortgages every year.
He lives just outside Minneapolis,
Minnesota, and shares a love of good books with his wife—and her beautiful garden,
with their talkative cat.
(See www.digitalagility.com for a complete resume.)
