University Voting Systems Competition

[2] 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.

[3] 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.