Membership Associations
Skypunch Technology delivers an immutable and cryptographically verifiable online voting system. This first-of-its-kind platform enables voters to audit their own ballot to strengthen transparency and trust in high-stakes elections.
Features
Once a ballot is submitted, it cannot be altered, deleted, or tampered with.
Every ballot cast in the Skypunch online voting system 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.
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 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.
The Skypunch online voting system 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.
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.
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 for consistency across recurring elections.
Deliver the right contests to the right voters. Use Visibility Codes to customize ballots by region, chapter, membership category, committee, or other voter attributes. Keep common contests visible to everyone.
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.
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.
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 for any position, this is particularly useful for referendums when you wish to learn how a voter feels about voting a certain way.
You may include candidate biographical information on the ballot and optionally include a photo. Biographies may be entered by an election administrator, or by the candidates themselves (recommended). 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 election managers to approve biographies and ensure it does not get modified after approval.
With the free-text option, candidates may freely submit whatever they wish.
This works very similarly to free-text biographies, but an election administrator creates a form into which a candidate submits their responses to ensure uniformity across all candidate biographies.
Conduct the pre-election activity of nominating and vetting potential candidates 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 Simplified 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 the Skypunch online voting system with external platforms including AMS systems, Higher Logic, and other custom applications to simplify 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.
Who Uses the Skypunch Online Voting System
The Election Lifecycle With Skypunch
From initial setup to reporting results, Skypunch gives organizations the tools to manage elections in a way that fits their needs. The following is a high-level overview of the process.
Get Started With Your Client Account
New clients can create an account directly on the Skypunch website and use the election administration console to build and manage their elections. Skypunch supports a wide range of elections, from contested races and referendums to elections using plurality or ranked choice voting.
Organizations that conduct recurring elections can save time by copying a previous election rather than starting from scratch each time.
Streamline Nominations and Candidate Preparation
For elections that involve candidate nominations, the optional Skypunch Nomination Engine supports a structured process for accepting, reviewing, and vetting prospective candidates before they are approved for inclusion on the ballot. An individual or a designated committee can evaluate nominees and determine who qualifies to advance, helping organizations enforce their nomination rules and maintain control over candidate eligibility.
If candidate biographies are included on the ballot, candidates can submit their own information, reducing the administrative effort required to collect and prepare candidate profiles. These optional capabilities help streamline and simplify the life of the election manager.
Choose How Voters Access the Ballot
Most organizations conduct their elections entirely on the Skypunch website. For these elections, the administrator uploads a list of eligible voters before voting begins. The list can also be updated during the election to add eligible voters as needed.
Organizations seeking a more integrated experience can use the Skypunch API to incorporate voting into their own websites or applications. Alternatively, delegated authentication allows voters to authenticate through an existing third-party website and pass that authentication to Skypunch.
This flexibility lets organizations choose an approach that fits their existing systems and the experience they want to provide voters.
Accommodate Online and Paper Voting
Not every voter can or wishes to vote online. Skypunch supports hybrid elections that combine electronic voting with the processing of paper ballots, allowing organizations to accommodate voters who need a paper option while managing participation through a unified election process.
By coordinating online and paper voting, the system helps ensure that each eligible voter can cast only one ballot, even when an election offers multiple ways to participate.
Manage, Verify, and Report the Results
Administrative activity is logged, providing a record of important changes to election settings, candidates, positions, and voter records.
When voting concludes, election managers can retrieve and analyze results using Skypunch’s reporting tools. They can also perform a two-step cryptographic verification process to confirm the integrity of all ballots. Managers can then publish official results directly on the Skypunch website, providing a clear conclusion to the election process.
Pricing
Viewable once logged into a client account.