Review of the E-Voting-Competition 2008 this summer

E-Voting.CC, the competence centre for electronic voting and participation in Vienna, has started the first European E-Voting competition last January. Our aim was to get international submissions of single persons or teams who programmed an Internet voting system which can be used for association elections.

The submitted systems had to comply with the following:

■ A fully operational voting system, accessible on the Internet has to be submitted.
■ The software’s source code must be completely revealed and accessible for further, licence-free development.
■ Documentation of the software and all processes is compulsory.
■ The fundamentals of general, equal, secret, free, direct and personal elections must be met and secured.
■ The system shall facilitate the clearing of elections of unincorporated associations.
■ WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) conformity for barrier free internet access has to be ensured.

An international jury of five expert selected three of the eight submissions we’ve got to be presented at the Third International Conference on Electronic Voting, which has was held from the 6th to 9th of August 2008 in Bregenz, Austria - one of the locations of the new James Bond movie. The three competitors had to defend their systems in front of the jury, which scrutinized the systems thoroughly.

The lucky winner was a Greek team called “PNYKA” from the University of Patras. Their solution could score through sophisticated security measures and high usability. PNYKA was the largest team and their members had developed the system for an earlier research program, which was an advantage indeed.
Two subsidized awards were given to an Austrian (Daniel Ratzinger) and a German student (Gerold Grünauer).

Winning team: PNYKA
Country: Greece
Members: Yannis Stamatiou, Christos Manolopoulos, Dimitris Sofotassios, Giorgos Avramidis and Antonis Tatakis
Short system description: PNYKA is an internet based electronic voting system which was developed within the scope of a research program of the General Secretariat for Research and Technology of the Greek Ministry of Development.

Please find further details on the software here.

We hope, that our project created a tool with which associations can set up their elections and that the discussion on internet voting systems and electronic participation was nourished.

Daniel Botz (Project Assistant, E-Voting.CC)

Tags: eVoting