A team composed of researchers from two U.S. universities and a Canadian university won the $10,000-prize for best voting system at the VoComp contest held in Oregon this week. The winning team was composed of Aleks Essex and Jeremy Clark from the University of Ottawa, Stefan Popoveniuc from George Washington University, and Richard T. Carback III from the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Although only four teams submitted systems to the first-time competition, more are expected to submit next year when the competition, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, returns. (Clarification: this year's competition was sponsored by NSF. The foundation hasn't yet committed to sponsoring another one next year, although Election Systems & Software – the company awarding the $10,000 prize this year – has committed to fronting the same prize at next year's competition.)

The winning Punchscan system is based on a concept developed by cryptographer David Chaum that allows voters to take a receipt of their vote home with them to later verify online that their vote was part of the tabulated results. See the web site showing how it works.

Chaum later developed his own system, Scantegrity, from the same concept used in Punchscan. Scantegrity is fully open source (in Java). Chaum says the system is easy to implement with current optical-scan voting systems, thus reducing costs and the time it would take to get the voting system certified and implemented in election districts. Chaum is offering a free license to the first election districts that are willing to try and roll out the system.

UPDATE: Per Ron Rivest, one of the contest's judges, the runner-up team, the Pret-a-Voter team from the University of Surrey in the UK, gave Punchscan a tough run for the first-place money until the Punchscan team dug through Pret-a-Voter's source code and found a significant security flaw in their random number generation. Oops.

Nonetheless, Rivest says the judges were impressed by all the teams, given the short timeframe in which they had to submit their projects. The contest was announced last October.