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The University Voting Systems Competition, or VoComp is an annual competition in which teams of students design, implement, and demonstrate open-source 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.
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, and Hewlett-Packard Company. The four teams that competed were:
The judging panel included MIT professor Ron Rivest, Microsoft security researcher Josh Benaloh and John Kelsey of NIST.
The Punchscan team was awarded the "Best-Election System" grand prize and $10,000 from ES&S after uncovering a security flaw in the random number generator in the source code of the runner-up team, Prêt à Voter.