Verify your vote

Chicago

You don't have to take anyone's word for it. There are two independent checks: one you can do right now, and one anyone can do after the election closes.

1 · Confirm your ballot was recorded

Enter the receipt code shown when you voted. This confirms your ballot is stored — it never reveals how you voted or who you are.

Lost your receipt? It was on your confirmation screen. If you can't find it, your chapter's elections committee can look up your ballot status for you.

2 · Independently verify the whole count (after close)

After voting closes, the election administrators publish three files that let anyone — you, any candidate, any observer — recompute the entire result from scratch, with no access to the live system:

With those files you can:

  1. Find your own receipt in ballots.csv and confirm the votes next to it are exactly what you cast.
  2. Recompute the fingerprint from ballots.csv and check it matches the published chain_head.txt — if even one ballot were changed, added, or removed, it wouldn't match.
  3. Recount it yourself — run the open-source tally on ballots.csv (or upload the published .blt to OpaVote) and confirm the winners.
  4. Check turnout — the number of ballots equals the number of used codes, and every used code was on a list published before voting opened (so no codes were manufactured).

A ready-made checker (Python standard library only) does steps 2–4 automatically:

python verify.py ballots.csv used_codes.csv chain_head.txt

Get verify.py and the full source (AGPL-3.0) · how the tabulation is tested · the counting methods


Prefer not to run anything? Verify the tamper-evidence fingerprint right here — your browser downloads the published ballots and recomputes the whole chain locally.

Published files: ballots.csv · used_codes.csv · chain_head.txt

What this does and doesn't prove

It proves your ballot is in the published record with your votes, unaltered; that no ballot was tampered with; and that the announced winners follow from the published ballots. That's a stronger guarantee than "trust us" — it's independently reproducible.

Honest limits: because you can look up your receipt and see your own votes, you could also show them to someone else — so keep your receipt private if you'd prefer your vote stay between you and the record. And this confirms what was recorded; verifying that your device submitted exactly what you intended is the one step you perform yourself, at the moment you vote.

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