After a ballot closes and results are finalized, you can independently verify that your vote was counted correctly — without trusting Ekklesia, the voting authority, or any operator-controlled service.

What you’ll need

• Your voter identifier (e.g., stake1..., drep1..., pool1..., or a CIP-95 credential hex). This is what was hashed to produce the voter token your wallet held during the vote.
• The voting authority’s admin wallet address for the ballot.
• A Blockfrost project ID for the network the ballot lives on (mainnet, preprod, or preview). Free tier is sufficient.

How verification works

When a ballot is finalized, Ekklesia publishes a merkle tree whose leaves are every counted vote. The merkle root is committed to Cardano L1 in the (601) ballot-instance token’s inline datum.

To verify your vote, the auditor:

1. Reads the merkle root straight from L1.
2. Fetches the published proof package from IPFS (its CID is also on L1).
3. Reproduces the merkle path for your voter ID from the leaf back to the root.

If the path reproduces the on-chain root, your exact vote — choices, signature, and all — is provably part of the dataset that produced the on-chain result.

Step-by-step verification

The same audit tool used by technical auditors has a --voter mode that runs every relevant check for a single voter and prints a focused summary of the cast vote. Download audit_ballot.py from Downloads and run:

pip install cbor2 cryptography bech32

python3 audit_ballot.py \
    --admin <voting-authority-address> \
    --blockfrost-key <your-blockfrost-project-id> \
    --network mainnet \
    --voter <your-voter-id>

--network accepts mainnet, preprod, or preview. --voter accepts either:

• a bech32 voter identifier — drep1..., pool1..., stake1..., stake_test1..., cc_cold1..., cc_hot1...; or
• the 58-character hex token name that appears on-chain (the script prints the full list when you run a full audit).

The on-chain commitments (steps 1–4) and the (601) UTxO lineage trace (step 9) still run, so you confirm the whole record is genuine before trusting the inclusion proof for your individual vote. The per-voter checks (steps 5–8) run only for your voterId.

What the focused output tells you

--- Step 5: per-voter merkle inclusion proofs walk back to the on-chain root
  [OK]   voter <yours> -> root
--- Step 6: per-voter evidence file blake2b_256 matches each committed voteHash
  [OK]   voter <yours> -> v1 matches committed voteHash
--- Step 7: per-voter COSE_Sign1 signatures verify
  [OK]   voter <yours>: ed25519+message+credential verified — matched drep key credential
--- Step 8: per-voter vote-history chain integrity
  [OK]   voter <yours>: history chain intact (1 entry); last voteHash matches leaf
--- Your vote — <token name>
  voterId:        <bech32 you provided>
  signing key:    <blake2b-224 of your wallet's signing pubkey>
  voteHash leaf:  <leaf in the on-chain merkle tree>
  version:        v1
  Hydra txHash:   <the L2 transaction that recorded the vote>

  YOUR ANSWERS (cryptographically anchored to the on-chain merkle root):
    Q [...]  <question title>
       -> 1
    Q [...]  <question title>
       -> opt1 {value=1}; opt2 {value=5}; ...

Five [OK] lines and the closing AUDIT PASSED banner mean your vote is provably in the final on-chain merkle tree, was signed by your wallet, and the displayed answers are byte-identical to what you signed when you cast the vote. If you re-voted, the script also prints a RE-VOTE HISTORY block listing every cast version with the latest flagged COUNTED and the rest superseded.

If anything fails, the script tells you exactly which step diverged and on what hash, so you can take it up with the voting authority with specific evidence in hand.

Save a portable receipt

Pass --voter-receipt receipt.json along with --voter to write a small JSON file that captures everything needed to re-prove your inclusion later, offline, against any future Cardano indexer:

python3 audit_ballot.py \
    --admin <voting-authority-address> \
    --blockfrost-key <your-blockfrost-project-id> \
    --network mainnet \
    --voter <your-voter-id> \
    --voter-receipt my-vote-receipt.json

The receipt contains:

• The on-chain anchors — evidenceMerkleRoot, resultsHash, fanoutTxHash, the (601) UTxO reference — so anyone reading the receipt years from now knows exactly where on Cardano L1 to look.
• Your voteHash, tokenName, and full merkle inclusion proof (sibling hashes from your leaf to the on-chain root).
• Your signedPayload.votes — the byte-stable answers you signed.
• A short verificationRecipe text describing the algorithm step by step, so a third party can verify the proof from first-principles without running this script at all.

If something happens to ekklesia.vote, the IPFS pin, or anything else later, the receipt plus a Cardano explorer is enough to prove your vote was counted.

For a deeper walk-through of every commitment hop, what each one proves, and how to verify by hand from first-principles tooling, see the Technical Auditor Guide.

Why final results may differ from preliminary

During a live ballot, provisional results may be displayed periodically as a convenience. These are strictly informational.

Ekklesia tabulates the cryptographic record of who voted and how. The application of voting power, voter eligibility, and thresholds is the responsibility of the voting authority — the organization conducting the vote. These factors are applied to the auditable results produced by Ekklesia, not by Ekklesia itself.

Final published results may differ from provisional displays once the voting authority applies their eligibility and weighting criteria.