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."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More...