Digital Ledger Changes at Skypunch
Categorized as: Product Development
There has been a significant change in the underlying technology of the Skypunch voting system that clients should know about as it impacts the verification of ballots.
For years, the technology at the heart of the Skypunch solution has been a trade secret and not disclosed publicly. That technology, introduced to the market by AWS in beta in 2019 and general availability in 2020 is called Quantum Ledger Database. It is a trade secret no more because in mid-2024 AWS announced they are discontinuing the service in July of 2025. And to throw a little extra salt in the wound, what they proposed as an alternative was laughable.
Fortunately while AWS may have been first to market with such a solution, since 2020 a couple of other major players in the database world have introduced technologies built to compete with it. At a granular level, they may take a slightly different approach, but the solution still amounts to an immutable, and cryptographically verifiable digital ledger. The heart of the Skypunch solution has now been reworked to adopt one of these newly-available options and while the initial news about Quantum Ledger Database being discontinued certainly stung, the truth is, the system is now a fair bit simpler overall with respect to its architecture—and simplicity is always a very welcome thing.
This change was implemented seamlessly, with no downtime, and there is no difference from a voters’ perspective when submitting a ballot. The one area where there is a small difference is with ballot verification. In fact, the three-step ballot verification wizard voters could step through after receiving their ballot confirmation email, is no longer a wizard. It’s just a single page into which they paste a ballot verification code—delivered via email after submitting a ballot—and voilá, they verify the integrity of their ballot.
Verification for managers across a batch of ballots is no different and still involves the two-steps described at Election Verification and Certification. Here is where there may be a hiccup. Because elections are running all the time with overlapping start and end dates, it is impossible to implement such a change between the end of one, and start of another. That means there may be voters who visit the ballot verification wizard using a verification code generated while the now defunct system was in use. Attempting to authenticate that against a totally new system will not work. If an election manager is contacted by a voter reporting that they can not verify their ballot, simply open a support ticket and we’ll work through this transition period one by one. The same goes for election managers verifying an entire election. There may be some ballots in the old system and some in the new. If there are issues, simply open a support ticket and we’ll work through it on a case-by-case basis.
