Captcha testing and voting restrictions

Sometimes we are faced with deliberate attempts (bad or irrational) to influence voting results. Such attempts may discredit the outcome, rationality of poll’s results or our own efforts to create the democratic voting platform and true representative survey of public opinion. We then must protect all polls against external attempts of abuse. We protect all polls equally without exceptions. Democratic, equal and balanced system is at our mission.

The ElectionsMeter project is non-governmental, independent, non-profit and non-commercial project with ambitions to be a long-term and affordable alternative survey of public opinion in politics. We do our best (through an unusual number of complications) to implement the project independently, impartially, responsibly and seriously.

Some polls has relatively small quantity of voters but high and growing popularity. In such a situation ElectionsMeter system must recognize and decide whether it is by result of bad attempt or by natural will of voters. System always applies our own general mathematic-statistic formula to decide it, in every minute, at every vote.

Some polls in certain situations are protected by Captcha test. In extreme situation some polls get protected by temporal voting restriction.

If you are bothered by Captcha testing, please sign-in. Later then you are advised to upgrade your account to Comfort rights.

Introduction of ElectionsMetr in the Czech rep.

We have decided to test ElectionsMetr system, principles, politicians and public acceptance first in the Czech republic. It is small country, good enough for initial introduction of the project and very close to our hearts.

According to the plan we are about to visit Czech politicians and personally introduce them ElectionsMeter project, mission, background and the ways it might be useful to them and to the public. The introduction is supported and documented by Czech written blog. Later then in few weeks German speaking countries should follow.

ElectionsMeter goes for new hosting

Today ElectionsMeter was migrated to a new server. Much faster, safer and reliable. It is significant step ahead. We have just met one of important milestones of the project. Stay tuned. Some other improvements will come soon.

update 2011 #14

ElectionsMeter is getting better and better. Last year we spent in our small team in silence but hard working on serious performance and security improvements of the site. New features and particular redesign was also on our target.

Site features become better then anytime before. Feel free to come to vote, express your opinion, add content (your comments, pictures, videos, link websites), express your support, join friends, compare voting profiles, see advanced voting statistics, compare politicians, promote politicians, join politicians in marketing support etc. We continue in site development. Further features are about to come. Join us. Support us.

update 2009 #13

Data, new pols
Ing. Mhd. Hashem Taufiqui , Petro Koçi , Ilir Meta , Belgische politieke partijen , Laura Chinchilla Miranda , Jaroslav Foldyna , Roman Šmucler , Jaromír Drábek , Fritz Kuhn , Tarek Al-Wazir , Friedrich Merz , Erika Steinbach , Christian Wulff , Dieter Althaus , Ilse Aigner , Piratenpartei Deutschland , Jens Seipenbusch , Jürgen Trittin , Renate Künast , Andreas Popp , Peter Ramsauer , Gerda Hasselfeldt , Günther Oettinger , Klaus Wowereit , Matthias Platzeck , Jens Böhrnsen , Roland Koch , Ole von Beust , Erwin Sellering , Kurt Beck , Peter Müller , Jürgen Rüttgers , Stanislaw Tillich , Wolfgang Böhmer , Peter Harry Carstensen , Andrea Ypsilanti , Die Republikaner , Rolf Schlierer , Internet Censorship Controversy , Homosexual marriage , Health care system , Michael Melchior , Renovación Nacional (Perù) , Béla Bugár , Piratpartiet , Rickard Falkvinge ,

System , new functionality
- help page, to shortly guide users through the site
- users directory, to access users and their profiles
- improved routines for detection of spam or other inappropriate activity
- started to publish information about users and IP address which were banned or blacklisted for exceeding limits of rational activity

We are not alone on the way of new thinking

National politics is discredited. The wrong people are in power. The whole system is broken. But through technology we can all fight back. Andreas Whittam Smith, The revolution by text.

update 2009 #12

Our sorry for longer delay in the blog updates. I was busy for the site development and optimization. Following is the improvement from the last 3 months:

- Further optimization of SQL queries (every single query was reviewed)
- Further optimization of database structure
- Further on-page SEO optimization
- Started working on off-page SEO optimization
- Created Twitter support, posting news to few Twitter accounts
- ElectionsMeter sitemap survey of polls
- Support User to user communication
- User profiles were extended for user’s Facebook, Twitter account, blog url and short info about the user’s mission
- Display of user notice boards
- Spread Nofollow attribute on links where desired
- Users can now vote on users opinions
- Users can include own links in polls and vote about the links. User’s links display snapshot of the linked site.
- Some javascript and ajax was used to make polls more user friendly and interactive
- User’s are now fully supported to edit and delete their own entries
- Launched users statistics to decently display users activity
- Other statistics support for last 10 entries on the site and top 10 entries on the site
- Added automatic control of users trying abuse site voting limits
- Improved automatic control detecting external programmed scripts and voting robots
- Embedded PHPBB forum was updated and SEO optimized
- Social linking service was extended and optimized to better reflect country specific linking sites
- Added functionality to invite friends, to send an email with the particular poll data.
- Polls display little more information in their analytics section. Newly every poll indicates user name (or IP address if not logged in) of the last voter voting in the poll.
- and many more updates ..

Site optimization

Already planned (some improvements already done) and also in reflection to recent heavy traffic on the site we did some site optimization:
- cache setup
- etags setup
- CDN setup (temporal)
- CSS and Javascript compression
- Pictures compression optimization
- CSS sprites
- MySQL queries and indexes
- conditional layout display

Having all above improvements implemented we were lucky to reduce size of site code by half, loading speed for several seconds and responsiveness of database queries number of times.

The site should be now enough optimized to process traffic of 6 thousand voting users per hour.

Users attack poll "Creationism vs. Evolution"

Professor at the University of Minnesota, PZ Mayers posted on June 4, 2009 link to ElectionsMeter poll "Creationism vs. Evolution" on Pharyngula (Scienceblogs). He very likely wanted his readers to have a little fun while voting in this particular “pointless” poll. Readers then encouraged themselves to beat the poll to give lesson to all creationists. They came and hit the site with sudden high traffic so the site was overloaded. Within 24 hours 10 thousand users hit the poll (pike 3000 users per hour). To be honest we failed in this test of site performance. The site was very slow responding and even unavailable to some users so we decided immediately to review site code for better performance.

The same poll link appeared also on Bannination site. Where someone posted discussion about Evolution “Proof that Creationists are really juvenile. Do you love Jesus or Darwin?“ and linked the poll.

It was pretty good exercise for us. For the first time we could experience really huge bunch of users using the site, voting and commenting. The only thing we could finally regret after such attack of users (I am sorry to say, fascist of unified opinion) the result of the poll is not very representative. Wow! This is part of democracy. The poll was not abused in any way but simply and perfectly reflects will of the users. A problem however exists with type of users (users of unified opinion). The poll simply and drastically misses users of the other opinion. We as the site providers cannot be asked to adjust the poll result according to any reason, we can only encourage rest of the population to express its vote. The big question is only are there any Creationist, do they know about the poll, do they have interest to join the poll, does the general population ever have interest to vote in poll, if then what the general population be voting for, are only fascists interested in voting?

Will further users balance the result?

update 2009 #11

Data :
(1) new pols
Přijetí měny EURO v České republice, Gerald Häfner, Treaty of Lisbon, Lisabonská smlouva, Junge Liberale Österreich, Alev Korun

System :(1) new functionality
- simple sitemap, all polls and best bookmarks
- simple links survey, index of extenal links
- features of system mananagement and maintenance were extended
- links service by Addtoany was implemented to footer of every page (available to registered uses)
- RSS connections by Addtoany were implemented to RSS page

(2) improvements
- design of front page was simplified
- little update of Metadatas
- attempt of login will return erorr message if user's internet browser has cookies disabled or accidentaly deleted