It may seem confusing, but there are only a few steps towards verifying your election. Here we outline how you can participate in making elections more secure and reliable for the future! To learn more about the technical details explore our developers page!
ElectionGuard will not change your voting experience a lot. All you will need to do is vote on an electric ballot box. Once you are done, it will print out a paper copy for you to review. You will then submit the paper copy to the front desk for manual counting as usual!
When you submit your ballot, you will have the option of “spoiling the ballot” at the front desk. Spoiling a ballot means that ballot will not count toward the actual results of the election and you will be able to vote again. Spoil as many as you like until you are ready to submit your real ballot.
After every time you spoil a ballot and after you submit your real ballot, you will receive a receipt with a number on it. Take these receipts home and keep them until the election is finished. Also, try to remember what you put on your spoiled ballots. This will all come in handy later on.
After you go home, you can find your election results online from your local officials. All the actual votes are completely anonymous and no one can tell who voted for what. You can however, find an ElectionGuard verifier from anywhere that you trust and run the election results through the it to see if the results were counted correctly.
While actual election ballots cannot be viewed, all of the spoiled ballots are open to the public as they are not counted as real votes. Put your receipt what’s on the spoiled ballot. This should match what you put on the ballot, and if it does, that means the ballots were recorded correctly!
