Hello: Many news sites on the web have a section where the readers may vote their opinion on some specific question concernining some political, moral, or social issue. A person responding to the poll may click on the appropriate box to indicate his yay or nay or undecided opinion, and then click on the button to submit his opinion. The votes are tabulated and the results are published on the web site.
Of course it is to everyone's advantage to have it appear that his own opinion, whatever it may be, reflects the opinion of the majority. Therefore the respondents might all feel tempted to vote more than once. There would be nothing illegal in responding more than once in a public opinion survey on the same question at the same web site. The laws against voter fraud apply only to official elections. Questions: Do these web pages designed for the purpose of collecting opinions from the public usually have some kind of mechanism to collect only one vote per IP number per each site access on the same site? Could anyone submit his own opinion multiple times for the same question on the same web site and by using the same computer during the same session and have each one of his votes counted as valid? If such is the case, then none of these kinds of surveys has any integrity. If these kinds of surveys have no integrity, then what is the point in conducting such surveys in this manner? Answers, anyone? Sam Heywood -- This mail was written by user of The Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/
