Students world over invited to e-voting competition Mike Sheehan
Published: Thursday November 2, 2006 Print This Email This College students from around the world have been invited to design their ideas for a better electronic voting system, according to National Journal's Technology Daily.
"The VoComp Competition, which officially launched Thursday, will pit teams of students from universities in the United States and abroad in a global competition to develop state-of-the-art election systems ready for use in real-life environments," writes Michael Martinez. "The sponsor is the National Science Foundation, and the winning team will receive $20,000."
Election Systems & Software, an American e-voting technology company, will be awarding the monetary prize.
A University of Maryland professor who helped organize the competition said he "hopes the event encourages students to develop innovative solutions to make elections fair, accurate and accessible to voters," according to the article.
The 2006 election season in the United States has been marred by reports from across the country of e-voting irregularities and unreliability, as reported at RAW STORY, The BRAD BLOG and other news sites.
Excerpts from the article follow...
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Students from all over the globe soon will have an opportunity to compete against each other to build reliable, accurate election systems over the next several months.
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A joint team from UMBC and George Washington University already has entered the competition, along with teams from Rice and Stanford universities. International teams from Newcastle University in the United Kingdom and Wroclaw University in Poland also have entered the fray.
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Before the news conference, a team of students led by DigiCash founder David Chaum showed off their Punchscan system, an optical-scan system that allows voters to retain portions of their paper ballots as receipts and implements mandatory post-election audits.
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Chaum said he is particularly excited that the students behind Punchscan will have an opportunity to participate in VoComp. He said the competition represents an olive branch between the academic community and e-voting manufacturers, which he said have developed a strained relationship during the past several years.
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