Online Voting System

Once a ballot is submitted, it cannot be altered, deleted, or tampered with.

Every Skypunch ballot is written to an immutable, cryptographically verifiable, append-only ledger database — creating a permanent and defensible system of record.

Ballots are streamed in near real-time to a high-performance analytics datastore, and election managers can complete a built-in two-step verification process before retrieving and analyzing results.

The outcome is a secure, auditable, and certifiable election that can withstand scrutiny.

Learn more about election verification and certification.

Voters may compare a hash value of a specific ballot against the expected hash value of the entire ledger database in which their ballot is stored. When the values match, it proves that a ballot has not been altered in any way and is being included in the vote tabulation. See Ballot Verification for a full explanation or submit the Sample Ballot on this website and proceed into the verification process afterwards.

Ranked choice voting means voters will have the option to rank candidates in the order of their preference. If a voter’s first preference does not win, votes transfer to the next preference. You may hear this referred to as single transferable vote, or instant runoff elections in cases where only a single candidate may win an open seat. Learn more at Ranked Choice Voting.

Secret balloting, the de facto standard across the globe, disassociates a voter from their ballot making it impossible to determine how an individual voted.

To ensure the voting pages are accessible for all users, including those who are visually impaired, Skypunch works with a respected third-party auditing firm to periodically review the voting pages for compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act.

You may attach candidate biographical information to the ballot so it is available by clicking the candidate’s name. These biographies may also include a photograph of the candidate. For an example, see this site’s Sample Ballot which includes candidate biographies with photos.

You may display more than just contests between humans. You may also include a referendum which voters may either accept or reject, and show a description of the referendum on the ballot so voters will clearly understand what they’re voting on.

Ballot Shuffling outputs the candidates’ names in random order on each request of the ballot. This eliminates the concern that the candidate whose name appears first in the list has an advantage. Shuffling may be enabled on some positions and not others.

Skypunch generates ballots that display well on all desktop computers plus the many varieties of mobile devices and tablets in common use so voters may comfortably vote from anywhere, at any time, using the device of their choice.

Gives the voter the ability to write-in a candidate’s name of their own choosing.

Automatically notify voters when an election begins and send up to two scheduled reminders to those who have not yet voted. Built-in delivery reporting helps administrators maintain accurate voter lists and improve future outreach reliability. This feature is only available for elections with fewer than 5000 voters. Otherwise such emails need to originate from within the client’s domain.)

Publish official election results directly through Skypunch, providing voters with immediate access to certified outcomes while reinforcing transparency and trust in the election process.

Skypunch archives your election results for up to 10 years to simplify doing a year-to-year comparison.

Instantly duplicate a previous election setup to eliminate repetitive configuration work and ensure consistency across recurring elections.

Deliver the right contests to the right voters. Use Visibility Codes to tailor ballots by region, chapter, membership category, committee, or other voter attributes, while ensuring that common contests remain visible to everyone.

Ballot weighting allows some ballots to carry more weight than others. For example, you may have a voter who casts a single ballot, but that ballot has a “weight” of ten. In this case, when the election results are generated, that ballot will be counted as if ten identical ballots had been cast by this voter. The default weight for ballots is one, but you may specify any number as the ballot weight for any voter.

On-demand paper ballots permit you to print out a paper ballot for any voter requesting to vote by paper. On-demand paper ballots are specific to a particular voter and display only the appropriate positions that voter should see exactly as if they accessed the web-based ballot.

Voters can be provided the option to submit free-text comments along with their ballot. While disabled by default, comment fields may be enabled for certain positions and left disabled for others. While you may enable comments with any position, this is particularly useful for referendums when you wish to glean some insight into how a voter feels about voting a certain way.

So an election administrator is not burdened with loading candidate biographical material into the system, you may permit the candidates to submit their own materials. This feature supports the ability to designate a deadline by which this must be completed after which the candidates will not be able to make any further changes. This permits you to approve their biographies and ensure it does not get modified after approval.

With the free-text option, candidates may freely submit whatever they wish.

So an election administrator is not burdened with loading candidate biographical material into the system, you may permit the candidates to submit their own materials. This feature supports the ability to designate a deadline by which this must be completed after which the candidates will not be able to make any further changes. This permits you to approve their biographies and ensure it does not get modified after approval.

With the form-based option, candidates must provide responses to questions defined by an election administrator.

Conduct the pre-election activity of nominating and vetting potential clients using the Skypunch system and allow selected candidates to flow right into the final ballot setup to streamline the overall election administration process. See Using the Nomination Engine for step-by-step instructions.

Specify up to three languages to be displayed on your voting pages and the order in which they display. Current choices are English, Spanish, French (Canadian), Portuguese (Brazilian), German, Italian, and Simple Chinese.

Associate up to four pieces of custom data such as age, gender, geography, et cetera, with your voters to facilitate segmenting election results to see how different demographic segments of the electorate voted.

Integrate Skypunch with external platforms including AMS systems, Higher Logic and other custom applications to streamline authentication, data flow, and election automation. For full details see the API Documentation.

The ballot software permits integration into your own web site to have the look and feel of your site. This also permits voters to access the ballot by logging into your site, something they may already be accustomed to doing, and not having to visit a third party’s website to vote.