Bennie Smith

Bennie Smith was appointed as a Commissioner in April 2019.

He is a software developer who works in analytics and innovation.

Smith has developed expansive business and technical skills throughout his career. In government, as a liaison between elected officials and IT, Smith was a software developer maintaining City of Memphis applications for divisions including the Traffic Violations Bureau, Memphis Police and Internal Affairs. 

In the private sector, he developed applications for lender auditing at First Tennessee Bank, production metrics at International Paper, revenue management at Hilton Worldwide, and later held positions at Thomas & Betts/ABB.

At ABB, Smith developed applications to transform 100M+ records into reporting data models, calculate sales, budgets, allocate $2B+ in sales targets though its organization to the agents, distribute $180M+ in agent commission payments, and an automated process to control $20M+ in excess or obsolete inventory. Using Lean/Six Sigma, he worked on cost saving to identify $1M+ in freight reductions and $60M+ in net price variance opportunities.

Smith operates Smartsoft, providing analytics, training, process automation, personal and corporate finance consulting, campaign strategy and demographic analysis for individuals, small and large businesses, and political campaigns. He is known locally for predicting voter turnout with his proprietary forecasting application. He has advised candidates for nearly every elected office in Shelby County. 

Smith is an advocate for election transparency and serves on the Technical Advisory Team for SMART Elections. He is best known nationally for his proof of concept and research series examining election system vulnerabilities. It was covered by Bloomberg in its Cyber Security Segment, and he was profiled in a cover story by Bloomberg Businessweek. Smith’s research is credited with uncovering an extraordinarily high-risk tampering mechanism. He provides a new method for analyzing questionable election results. It is the foundation for the Ballot Image Project and has been presented to election officials, elected officials and at security panels around the country.