Online Voting System

Skypunch ballots are written to an immutable and cryptographically verifiable, append-only ledger database making it impossible for a ballot to be modified or deleted once committed to the system. These system of record ballots are also streamed in near real-time to a data store purpose-built for high performance data analysis and election managers have the ability to perform a two-step verification process to ensure election integrity before retrieving and analyzing the results. 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.

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.

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

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 positions contested by humans on the ballot. 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.

When setting up your election, you may specify for Skypunch to send both an announcement at the start of the election, plus as many as two reminders during the election to voters who have not yet voted. You will also be able to access a report of any emails that could not be delivered. Use this report to remove any email addresses from your own records to protect your reputation as an email sender and improve deliverability in the future. (This feature is only available for elections with fewer than 5000 voters. Otherwise such emails need to originate from within the client’s domain.)

You have the option to publish election results directly on the Skypunch website for all your voters and candidates to see. This saves you the time of publishing the results yourself but also instills confidence in your electorate when they see the results published by the independent election company providing the service.

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

Create a single client account with unlimited sub-accounts and enjoy a pricing discount on every account in the family. This may be appropriate for large organizations with many smaller chapters who need to split election administration up among multiple individuals.

Clients may save time creating a new election by simply copying a previous election. For complex ballots using voter groups, special interest groups and other system features, this means you prevent going through all that setup repeatedly and only need to provide candidate names and election dates for elections after the first.

Voter groups display different positions based on voter profile. For example, you may have both professional and student members within your electorate and each group of voters should see a different set of positions. When used in combination with special interest groups, voter groups afford unequaled flexibility in ballot configuration.

Some organizations have special interest groups (SIGs) which voters may join in addition to belonging to the organization itself. These SIGs may conduct their own election in addition to the larger organization-wide election and using the Skypunch SIG tool permits configuring a ballot to show only SIG positions to voters that should see them. SIGs, in combination with voter groups, affords unequaled flexibility in ballot configuration.

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.

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.

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.

Accessing the API opens up numerous possibilities as explained in the next few points including single sign-on, and integrations with third-party websites, association management systems, the Higher Logic communities platform and anything else a client can dream up. 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.

Skypunch has several partnerships already in place to offer productized integrations into many of the association market’s leading systems. For a current listing, please see Integrations.

Higher Logic is the leading community building platform. Once the activity of voting has been stored inside a voter database like an AMS system, you have the ability to push it into Higher Logic to display an I Voted badge for those voters who have voted to drive increased awareness of, and participation in, your election. For more, visit Higher Logic Integration with Skypunch.