Are ballots shuffled before downloading?
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T K
Mar 28, 2026, 12:38:19 AMMar 28
to OpaVote Support Forum
Just ran my first election. I'm wondering if someone could discern how people voted by comparing the list of ballots to the "vote time" on the voter list, or if the ballots are shuffled so that, for example, the first person who votes is not necessarily the person whose ballot appears first.
Team OpaVote
Mar 30, 2026, 2:01:55 PMMar 30
to T K, opavote...@googlegroups.com
Hi TK,
That's a great question. The ballots are returned in a randomized (but stable) order on download, so it is not possible to correlate voters to their ballots based on times.
From a more technical standpoint, we don't store creation timestamps with the ballots, and our underlying persistence layer does not use sequential ids, so we wouldn't be able to order anonymous ballots by time cast if we wanted to.
That's a great question. The ballots are returned in a randomized (but stable) order on download, so it is not possible to correlate voters to their ballots based on times.
From a more technical standpoint, we don't store creation timestamps with the ballots, and our underlying persistence layer does not use sequential ids, so we wouldn't be able to order anonymous ballots by time cast if we wanted to.
Best,
-- Ana
Team OpaVote
https://opavote.com
T K
Apr 1, 2026, 10:48:59 PMApr 1
to OpaVote Support Forum
Fantastic - thanks very much!
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