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Leg day: Fri → Fri (19d) Recess

ABSURDITY INDEX OF THE UNITED STATES

EWP POC

Public Ballot Lookup

Anyone can verify that a specific ballot is included in the election record. Enter a ballot hash to check the bulletin board, Merkle inclusion proof, and VoteChain ledger anchor — all without revealing how anyone voted.

Look Up a Ballot

How to use: After casting your ballot, you received a receipt containing a ballot_hash. Paste it below and click Look Up to verify that your ballot is on the bulletin board and anchored on the VoteChain ledger.

What this proves: If all checks pass, your ballot was (1) recorded on the bulletin board, (2) included in the Merkle tree (so it can't be silently removed), and (3) anchored on the VoteChain ledger (an independent, append-only record). This is "recorded-as-cast" verification — proof that the system accepted your ballot.

Privacy: The ballot hash reveals nothing about how you voted. It's a one-way cryptographic fingerprint of the encrypted ballot — even the election authority can't reverse it to see your choices.

In a real election: This lookup would query the public bulletin board and VoteChain ledger — independent services operated by separate organizations and monitored by political parties, civil society, and international observers. Anyone could run their own verifier against the same public data and get the same result, ensuring no single authority can fabricate or suppress verification outcomes.

Public Bulletin Board

all recorded ballots

Every cast ballot is recorded as an encrypted entry on the public bulletin board. You can see all ballot hashes below — click any row to look it up. The bulletin board is append-only: once a ballot is added, it cannot be removed or modified without changing the Merkle root, which would be detected by any observer comparing tree heads.

In this POC, the bulletin board is stored locally in your browser. The VCL anchor for each ballot is recorded on the distributed Workers ledger nodes. In a real election, the bulletin board would also be a publicly accessible server that anyone could download and audit independently.

# Ballot Hash Leaf Hash Received

How Public Verification Works

The problem VoteChain solves: In traditional elections, you drop your ballot in a box and hope it gets counted. You have no way to verify it wasn't lost, altered, or excluded. VoteChain changes this by giving every voter a cryptographic receipt that proves their ballot was recorded — without revealing how they voted.

Three layers of proof: Each ballot is verified at three independent levels:

  1. Bulletin Board (BB) — Your encrypted ballot is appended to a public, append-only list. A Merkle inclusion proof proves it's part of the tree. If anyone deletes or alters a ballot, the tree root changes and every observer sees the mismatch.
  2. Signed Tree Head (STH) — After each ballot is added, the bulletin board publishes a signed snapshot (tree head). Independent monitors compare tree heads to detect split views or rollbacks.
  3. VoteChain Ledger (VCL) — Each cast event is anchored on the VoteChain ledger, a distributed, append-only record. Even if the bulletin board operator is compromised, the ledger provides an independent proof that the ballot existed.

Anyone can verify: The bulletin board, signed tree heads, and ledger events are all public data. Political parties, election observers, media organizations, and individual voters can all independently run this same verification and get the same result. No trust in any single authority is required.

What you can't see: The ballot hash is a one-way function of the encrypted ballot. Neither the hash, the Merkle proof, nor the ledger anchor reveal how anyone voted. Only the election trustees — acting together in a public ceremony — can decrypt the ballots during the official tally.