Lori Steele '86

Lori Steele is the world's top expert in election modernization, pioneering the adoption of software as a service to make elections more accessible, affordable, secure and transparent.  Her visionary leadership in business, innovation and elections led to Ms. Steele being named in 2013 to Fortune’s “10 Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs” list, and winner of San Diego Business Journal's “Women Who Mean Business Award.”

Since founding Everyone Counts, she has led innovative election administration and voting implementations involving voters in over 165 countries including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Australia.

Through Lori’s leadership, Everyone Counts is disrupting the $31 billion elections industry and migrating government and private-sector elections worldwide from antiquated hardware-based and error-prone manual and paper-based processes to Everyone Counts’ Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The company has delivered dozens of world-first innovations in election services over the past decade, including secure online ballot delivery in nearly 100 election jurisdictions across the United States in the 2012 Presidential election, the first use of iPads for voting in the State of Oregon in 2011 and 2012, and the largest ever online voting to-date in a government election in the state of New South Wales, Australia in 2011.

Bosnia-Herzegovina provided Everyone Counts’ voting systems to citizens with disabilities in a pilot election, so that they could vote privately and independently for the first time. Everyone Counts took stewardship of the State of New Jersey’s Voter Registration System in 2013, bringing state of the art technologies to voter registration.  And Everyone Counts was awarded the contract to migrate the Oscars from 85 years of vote by mail to online voting for the iconic Academy Awards resulting in their highest voter participation ever, two years in a row.

Lori previously served as a technology investor as Vice President at Salomon Smith Barney, specializing in emerging and state-of-the-art technologies globally. Ms. Steele’s election modernization expertise is frequently called on by legislators from around the world, and the media, including Time, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and The New York Times.

Lori earned her Bachelor of Science in Business Administration in 1986 from Bowling Green State University.

Published: 2014