This project will organize and hold a university competition, called VoComp, for students to design, implement, demonstrate, and evaluate voting systems.
Motivation. The world needs better voting systems. Competitions stimulate innovation and involvement. Currently, there is no student voting competition.
Proposed Research. The student voting competition will be run in four phases. In Phase 0 (October), student teams will register and submit proposals, and judges will be announced. In Phase 1 (January), each team will post an initial voting system design. In Phase 2 (by May), each team will conduct a realistic election on a university campus either a real or mock student election. In Phase 3 (June), any team completing Phase 2 will be invited to travel to the finals where each team will participate in a mock election, make an academic-style presentations about their system, and optionally give critical evaluations of other systems. A variety of prizes will be awarded.
Intellectual Merit. Students will design, implement, and demonstrate voting systems that provide election integrity, voter privacy, transparency, accuracy of vote capture, and user friendliness, and accessibility to the disabled. Students will present their designs, and optionally, critique competing ones and propose practical metrics for evaluating voting system performance.
Broader Impact. Vocomp will help advance voting technology, involve students in information security and voting system research, foster interactions among students and researchers, support courses on voting technology, and increase participation and awareness in the crucial civic process of voting. All designs, source code, and educational materials will be publicly shared.
