Election Verification and Certification
Election Verification is the two-step process performed by an election manager at the conclusion of voting that demonstrates the ballots cast during an election are true, accurate and unaltered. Certification is recognition by Skypunch Technology that the verification process was performed successfully at a specific point in time.
To understand the value of election verification, one must first understand that ballots are stored in an immutable and cryptographically verifiable digital ledger. This technology makes it impossible for data to be tampered with and have it go undetected. When data, like a ballot, is committed to this ledger, it is hash-chained using a cryptographic hash function to all previously committed data. The ledger also periodically generates what are called hash digests which are saved to a tamperproof data storage repository. Each hash digest may be thought of as a fingerprint of the entire ledger at a specific point in time. If one single piece of data in the ledger were to be modified, it would result in the hash digest having a very different value.
Step One—Ledger Verification
When the election manager is ready to perform verification, (typically at the conclusion of voting though there is no harm in doing it during voting), that manager visits the Verify election results page of their account and steps through steps one and two. In performing step one, there are two digest hashes that come into use.
- One is the hash digest that is one day older than the oldest ballot for an election. We call this the input digest and by virtue of it being one day older than the oldest ballot in an election, we are certain that all ballots for an election are included in the verification.
- The other is generated by the verification process at the moment of running verification. When the value recalculated using the input digest matches that of the ledger itself, we know with certainty that the ledger has not undergone any tampering between the time the input hash was generated and the verification process runs.
Step Two—Ballot Comparison
While the ledger is the definitive system of record, it does not support reporting the election results. Reporting is powered by a very high performance database. Therefore, before we know that the results tabulation can be fully trusted we must ensure there is a one-to-one exact match in the reporting platform for every ballot in the ledger. Step two, which can take a little while to complete depending on the number of ballots to examine, does this.
Certification Mark
An election is considered to have been verified by an election manager, and subsequently certified by Skypunch Technology, at the moment election verification is completed successfully. Once verified, the Skypunch Technology certification mark, including certification date, will appear on the results page. A sample might look like:
(Certification explained.)
Certification Date
All verification activity is timestamped. It is also possible to perform the verification process at any point during an election. When successfully performed midway through an election, it would trigger the certification mark and date to appear on the results page. Voting could continue with ballots being cast after the date of certification. This is ok, but it must be understood that any voting activity after the date of certification is not considered part of the certification. An election manager would need to again perform verification after the conclusion of all voting in order to generate a refreshed certification date that includes all voting activity. An election manager may repeatedly perform the verification with verification history viewable in a client’s account.
