Today John Edwards is launching a contest called My Vote, My Voice, which gives Edwards supporters the chance to create their own ads for the campaign.

The contest encourages supporters to create 30-second original ads describing why they support John Edwards, and to upload those ads to YouTube by January 16th. A panel of judges — including Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake and Elizabeth Edwards — will decide on the winning video. The producer will get the chance to meet with both John and Elizabeth, and will have their winning video aired on TV (the market will depend on the state of the race in the second half of January).

I spoke to Elizabeth Edwards this morning, and she provided some more details.

Despite similarities to Mitt Romney’s contest from earlier this year — in which supporters were supplied with video clips, music, and other tools and asked to put ads together — Elizabeth Edwards said she came up of with the idea on her own, inspired by a well-known Dorito’s ad contest more than anything else.

“It doesn’t need to be professional, and a lack of technical polish might actually make it engaging,” she told me. Though the contest is open to almost anyone (participants need to be registered to vote if they’re over 18), it will require a certain degree of technical proficiency, especially since the campaign isn’t providing any tools like Jumpcut, which partnered with the Romney campaign.

The campaign will be highlighting most of the submissions on the site, weeding out those with profanities or that attack other candidates. All of the eligible submissions will go up on the MyVote homepage. They’ll also highlight certain submissions on the blog. “Not every submission will go up on the site, but we’ll put up as many submissions that are particularly interesting as we can,” said Edwards.

When I asked about allowing voting on the submitted videos a la 10Questions.com, Edwards replied that it had occurred to her, “but the problem is that we have swarms from other campaigns, and you don’t want to subject yourself to someone misusing the system.” But a digg-like vote-up/vote-down system can help solve this sort of problem, and the Romney campaign — hardly known for its openness — proved that, with the exception of a couple of well-done videos produced by Slate, it’s possible to keep both the submissions process and the voting process fairly open.

The public will be able to comment on the featured submissions, however, and Edwards said those comments will be considered when the judges make their decision.

The campaign is open to any kind of content or style, but in line with the Edwards’ campaigns populist bent, Elizabeth Edwards told me she thinks that “the most compelling rationales are going to come out of people’s actual lives.”

If any of this sounds familiar, it might be because of its similarity to GeniusRocket, the startup co-founded by Edwards Senior Advisor Joe Trippi. The site features contests in which amateur producers can create ads for companies. The winners are chosen by both the public and a board of judges, and the winning producers receive cash prizes and a chance for their ad to air.

I asked Elizabeth Edwards if Trippi’s side project any influence on this contest. “This is the first I’ve heard of it,” she told me.

The contest is a huge improvement over contests like Hillary Clinton’s campaign theme song contest, in which supporters “chose” a song by Celine Dion, and should generate a fair amount of interest, though we’d like to see more transparency and public participation in the selection process. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be checking to see how the contest is progressing, though due to its semi-confidential nature we won’t be able to keep as close tabs as we’d like. But the Edwards site has a vibrant blogging and commenting community, and my guess is they’ll have no problem attracting submissions.