Punchscan Wins Open Source Voting Competition

An anonymous reader writes "Punchscan emerged victorious at the open source university voting systems competition, VoComp. For their efforts, they will receive the US$10,000 prize provided by ES&S (which has recently been named in a scandal in Florida). The second-place team put up a good fight: '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.' It will be interesting to see if these systems ever make it into the mainstream. Kudos to ES&S for showing their forward thinking in this area, as the other voting machine vendors, such as Diebold, did not support the competition."

So

[Anonymous Coward]

A system with a significant flaw in security comes second?

Why do they use a random number generator?

[Intron]

Does this explain the last two presidential elections?

The only problem I see with this

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

The only problem I see with this system, as it was with the hanging chads, is that people with poor vision or low brain power will be easily confused by the way the choices are out-of-order. Maybe they could use colored letters to make it easier to match them up, or even use pictures, e.g. a dog for Clinton, a snake for Giuliani.

Was it a fair competition?

[91degrees]

After seeing the machines, the 6 judges cast their votes electronically. The votes were 2 for Pret-a-voter, 3 for Punchscan and 107,345 for Diebold.

But...

[AntsInMyPants]

How did they count the votes to determine who won?