5. The Certificate Verification Registry

Every completed lottery comes with a signed, single-page Certificate of Authenticity. It is the document you hand to boards, auditors, applicants, or the public to prove the drawing was performed by an independent third party and that the results have not been altered.

What makes the certificate powerful is that anyone holding it can check it against AuditDraw's online Certificate Verification Registry, in under a minute, for free, with no account and no phone call.

What's on the certificate

Your Certificate of Authenticity (one of the four downloads from Chapter 3) contains:

• The name of the lottery
• The Certificate Key: a unique 15-character code in the form #####-#####-##### (for example S2JS6-AC65A-NM25X)
• The number of unique entries and the completion date
• Two AuthentiKey digital signatures, the cryptographic fingerprints of the run
• A QR code and web address linking to the certificate's permanent online record

How someone verifies your lottery

Any person you give the certificate to (or just the key) can verify it three ways:

1. Scan the QR code on the certificate with a phone camera, or
2. Follow the printed link on the certificate, or
3. Type the key by hand: go to auditdraw.com, click Verify a Certificate, enter the Certificate Key, and click Verify.

A matching key opens the lottery's permanent record, which displays the lottery's name, its Certificate Key, the number of unique entries, the completion date and time (in UTC), and the AuthentiKey digital signatures. The viewer compares these against the certificate in their hand: if everything matches, the certificate is genuine.

Who can see your lottery's record (and who cannot)

This part matters, so it gets its own space:

Important: the registry cannot be browsed or searched. There is no public list of lotteries, and no way to look one up by name, by organization, or by date. The only way to open your lottery's online record is with its Certificate Key. In practice, that means the only people who will ever see the record are people you deliberately gave either the certificate PDF or the Certificate Key itself.

Important: your privacy is built in. Neither your name, nor anyone on your team, nor your organization or agency's name appears on the certificate or anywhere in the verification registry. The record shows the lottery's name, its entry count, its completion time, and its digital signatures. Nothing more. Applicant information never appears in the registry, period.

Practical tips

• Share deliberately. Treat the Certificate Key like the certificate itself: give it to the people who should be able to view the record, and no one else.
• Use the Public Record Report alongside it. If stakeholders want detail beyond the certificate (the drawn order, for example), the Public Record Report PDF from Chapter 3 is the applicant-safe companion document made for sharing.
• Something looks off? If a viewer ever reports that the online record does not match a certificate in hand, contact us right away at service@auditdraw.com.