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Who knew that students were helping protect Election Day's honor?

The Rice Honor system was created in 1916. It's a code of ethics that all Rice students follow. But Dan Wallach, an associate professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering, wants students to break all the rules. Both graduate and undergraduate students in his popular "COMP 527: Computer Systems Security" course are expected to cheat — voting machines, that is. Traditional methods such as bribery, ballot stuffing and threats aren't acceptable, but technological subtlety is. Students are challenged to write a computer code that will alter election-day results — and then must switch roles and audit their peers' codes to identify the glitches. If they can find and foil attempts to spoil election results, democracy is well served. On our honor.