July 16th, 2007
US hosts VoComp to promote open source voting systems
After all the brouhaha over tamper-proof voting machines, the U.S. government has decided to sponsor a competition amongst university researchers to create the best open-source voting system, reports Wired News.
The three-day University Voting System Competition in Portland, Ore., July 16-18, has invited teams of researchers from the U.S., Canada, Poland and the United Kingdom to take part in mock elections to test out their systems. The competition will be judged by a panel that includes MIT professor Ron Rivest (the “R” in RSA Security), Microsoft security researcher Josh Benaloh, and John Kelsey from the National Institutes of Standards and Technology.
The lucky winning team gets a $10,000 prize from Election Systems & Software, the very company that manufactured the machines involved in contested 2006 congressional races in Florida.
NIST hopes the competition will have an impact on creating state-of-the-art secure voting procedures nationwide.
Three of the competition systems are based on “end-to-end (e2e) secure” technology, in which voters are able to verify votes are correctly recorded and tabulated. This technology offers a lot of promise to deliver much better assurance than “paper trail” technologies that votes cast are accurately recorded.
At the VoComp conference, Rivest will unveil his 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.
