The University Voting Systems Competition, or VoComp is an annual competition in which teams of students design, implement, and demonstrate

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

election systems. The systems are presented to a panel of security expert judges. The winners are awarded a cash prize provided by the sponsors. The competition was started by a group of students and professors from UMBC and George Washington University to inspire better ideas for electronic voting technology and raise student awareness of the political process.

Competitions

2006/2007 academic year

The first competition took place on July 16–19 during the 2006/2007 academic year in Portland, Oregon. The event was sponsored by The National Science Foundation,

Election Systems & Software Election Systems & Software (ES&S) is an Omaha, Nebraska-based company that manufactures and sells voting machine equipment and services. The company's offerings include vote tabulators, direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines, voter registrati ...

, and Hewlett-Packard Company. The four teams that competed were: * '' The Prêt-à-Voter Battle Bus'' from

University of Surrey The University of Surrey is a public research university in Guildford, Surrey, England. The university received its royal charter in 1966, along with a number of other institutions following recommendations in the Robbins Report. The institut ...

, *
The Voting Ducks
' from Wroclaw University of Technology, *
Prime III
' from

Auburn University Auburn University (AU or Auburn) is a public land-grant research university in Auburn, Alabama. With more than 24,600 undergraduate students and a total enrollment of more than 30,000 with 1,330 faculty members, Auburn is the second largest uni ...

, and * ''

Punchscan Punchscan is an optical scan vote counting system invented by cryptographer David Chaum. Punchscan is designed to offer integrity, privacy, and transparency. The system is voter-verifiable, provides an end-to-end (E2E) audit mechanism, and issu ...

'' a team consisting of members from George Washington University, University of Ottawa, and University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The judging panel included MIT professor Ron Rivest, Microsoft security researcher

Josh Benaloh Josh is a masculine given name, frequently a diminutive (hypocorism) of the given names Joshua or Joseph, though since the 1970s, it has increasingly become a full name on its own. It may refer to: People A–J * "Josh", an early pseudonym of S ...

and John Kelsey of

NIST The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sci ...

. The Punchscan team was awarded the "Best-Election System" grand prize and $10,000 from

ES&S Election Systems & Software (ES&S) is an Omaha, Nebraska-based company that manufactures and sells voting machine equipment and services. The company's offerings include vote tabulators, direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines, voter registrati ...

after uncovering a security flaw in the random number generator in the source code of the runner-up team, Prêt à Voter.

References

External links

Official VoComp SiteNational Science Foundation Award Abstract
Computer science competitions Election technology Student events {{computing-stub

Competitions

2006/2007 academic year

See also

References

External links