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Universities Compete for Most Trustworthy and Accurate Voting System

NSF-sponsored competition with $10,000 grand prize from ES&S, and other prizes from HP, to be awarded at the VoComp University Voting Systems Competition finals.

PORTLAND, Oregon – Four finalist teams of researchers, from the U.S., Canada, Poland, and UK, face off 16–18 July at the Portland Hilton in front of a panel of top experts. This competition, the first of its kind, also marks the first time a major voting company has supported such open-ended academic research. Each of the four finalist submissions is a complete open-source voting system, something that has been called for by many but not realized until now. The competition framework also serves to demonstrate what may be a better way to vet and choose voting systems.

In advance, each team publicly posted rigorous documentation and all source code for its system. At the competition finals, each team will carry out a mock election and critique the other systems in front of the judges. All sessions are free and open to the public.

Oregon’s Secretary of State Bradbury will introduce VoComp and invite attendees at the National Association of Secretaries of States annual summer meeting (at the same venue) to visit the competition.

Washington State is supplying one of the judges, Paul Miller, their manager of voting systems. Other judges are John Kelsey, a well-known security expert from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, involved in advising the federal government's voting systems standards work; Douglas Jones, Univ. of Iowa Professor, a long-standing academic expert on current voting systems who has helped a number of states evaluate such systems; MIT Professor Ronald Rivest, a key player in the MIT-CalTech Voting Project; Eric Lazarus, DecisionSmith, conducted threat modeling of voting systems for the Brennan Center; and Josh Benaloh from Microsoft Research, one of the first to propose secure cryptographic voting systems and a leading researcher in the field.

Three of the competition systems are based on revolutionary ``end-to-end (e2e) secure’’ technology, which enables each voter to verify that her vote was correctly recorded and tabulated. This new technology promises to surpasses the lower level of results assurance afforded by popular ``paper record’’ technologies such as precinct-count optical scan and VVPAT advocated by Senator Holt and others.

At the VoComp conference, speakers will introduce additional exciting new technologies. Rivest will unveil his new ThreeBallot voting system, which achieves e2e security without mathematical cryptography. David Chaum will describe his Scantegrity proposal for enabling voters to verify their votes using standard optical scan technology. Warren Smith will analyze the benefits of Range Voting (a more expressive form of approval voting) over the currently used plurality count method for conducting elections.

The competition is organized by Professor Alan Sherman, of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), who teaches a course on electronic voting systems and also organized the 2006 Pan-American Chess Championships. According to Sherman, “VoComp is stimulating innovation and student involvement in the technology of democracy.’’

Contact: Dr. Alan T. Sherman, Organizer
Cellular: (410) 963 4779
mail: dralansherman@starpower.net