Online Voting Hacks

Most of the online voting competitions are irresponsibly designed. These can be easily hacked if you have some tricks up your sleeve. The results are not truly dependent on the votes and in many cases, the organizations design these games to increase their profit margin by the process of marketing. There can be flaws in the system that can be targeted by a group of people. Hence it is advisable not to get involved with these competitions but if you still wish to play, here are some tricks that may help you win one.

Know how the system is designed

There are different ways how an online competition tracks the votes through a certain website.

1. GET method Web form:

This is a low security design where data gets pushed through the URL. In order to break it, continuously click the refresh button. Your IP address and cookies should be hidden, because there are chances that you are being watched. If you post that link anywhere, you can win a vote every time someone clicks on it. Well, most reputed competitions are not built on this platform but you may never know.

2. POST method Web form:

This is a medium security design where the form is passed through the request body but not displayed in the URL. The back button can be used to crack some of these competitions. You should block the cookies if you are using a browser like Google Chrome. If this does not work, these are some different approaches that you may try:

• Cookies: In some cases, a contest may allow anonymous votes fixed with timers that do not require a sign in process. Clear your cookies and vote repeatedly. The cookies of the website can be blocked using Chrome and a cookie remover that are available for download online.

• IP Tracking: Some contests track your voting through your IP address. If you can use a proxy server or a Virtual Private Network (VPN), you are good to go.

• Online Account Verification: you need to make multiple accounts in order to vote multiple times. This may seem very difficult and time consuming and does not support automatic mass voting.

• E-mail ID verification: You need to input your email id in the contest field. A link is sent to your email id and you need to click it in order to make your vote count. This is called Email based votes. You may interest to know: The new strategies which are using by marketing experts to obtain right votes for Email based sweepstakes.

3. Human Assisted Automatic Voting:

You can get human assisted vote using the following three ways:

(i) Request your friends and family from social media to vote for your contest.

This method helps you to get 500 to 1000 votes for any contest in average.

(ii) Request an online voting agency to manipulate contest votes.

Online voting agency can helps you to get up to 100,000 votes for some contests like polldaddy and stawpoll.

(iii) Hire a coder through freelancing websites.

With the help of a few third party tools, most online voting systems can be cracked. However, it may look suspicious if a particular candidate gets majority of the votes. Participants may report that cheating has occurred which can lead to disqualification. So you must be careful while voting for yourself to bypass any such chances.

4. Computer Assisted Programs:

You can sign up for a site like freelancer.com and post a project with your contest requirements to create a bot/software to increase vote count.

A sample project form picture is below:

Software designers have come up with computer macros which is a computer program based on mouse clicks or keyboard strokes in a particular time. Keep your cookies disabled and it should work fine if you combine it with a hotspot shield. Some programs that are available online are Macro Express and AutoHotkey which are programmed to click and enter information when required. So they basically turn your computer to a bot.

5. E-mail Generators:

Some voting systems are secured but email confirmations security is not that high. Some hacks can be implemented for creation of multiple accounts for systems that where you need to log in.

• An email would still be delivered to your email address by if some words are added by putting a ‘*’ after the name and before ‘@’.

• A bunch of aliases can be created for a particular account if you own a domain.

• Mailinator: This website generates emails on demand and provides an inbox to which the confirmation link is sent. Different email domains make multiple voting look less likely to be caught.

• Another way to get email votes is using a voting agency like said above. They should have list of thousands of Emails from different platform to apply real looking votes. Vapulsemedia voting team helps you to get votes slowly over time.

6. Outsourced voting and Proxy voting:

Outsourced voting involves hiring someone to vote for you. You need to pay a nominal amount to purchase votes for yourself. Proxy voting on the other hand means that someone transfers their voting rights to a third party. A single person can access multiple accounts simply by logging in to them and voting repeatedly.

Things that Online Contest Creators should consider

If you find that your system can be hacked by the above tactics, consider upgrading your security features. Your contest should be unbiased so that everyone can have equal chances of winning. Do not design your web form using GET methods to minimize the chances of anonymous voting. Consider using a third party authentication that can block email hacks. You can certainly design something such that every participant gets something or the other. In that way you can attract huge traffic.