Four teams of researchers from universities in the U.S., Canada, Poland and the United Kingdom begin competing today in Portland, Oregon, to win a prize for the best open-source voting system. The three-day University Voting System Competition, which ends July 18th, is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The competition, which is open to the public (see the schedule and Portland location here) will have each team performing a mock election on its system before a judging panel that includes MIT professor Ron Rivest (the "R" in RSA Security), Microsoft security researcher Josh Benaloh and John Kelsey from NIST. You can see papers describing all the voting systems here.
The winning team will receive $10,000 from Election Systems & Software -- the voting machine company that, ironically, is embroiled in an ongoing controversy over a contested congressional race in Florida in which more than 18,000 ballots cast on touch-screen machines last November showed no vote recorded in the 13 Congressional District race (the race is being investigated by the Government Accountability Office).
From a press release describing the voting systems in the competition:
