Fake Votes and Genuine Votes

We are all familiar with voting competitions. We also have knowledge of certain practices, which are illegal or fraudulent, which can cause unfair competition during voting. While these practices occur a lot in the usual, offline voting competitions, it also occurs a lot in online voting competitions. In case of online voting competition, it becomes difficult to understand which votes are genuine and which votes are illegal or fake.

Methods to keep track of fake votes

Illegal voting is something, which is very common in online voting competitions, especially the ones which occur in social networking websites. A simple way to keep a track of votes acquired or prevent illegal votes is by changing your audience settings to ‘User per day’. This ensures one vote is by one user account, and you can check the IP address of the voter by checking the Vote Export file. If the voting criteria have been based upon IP addresses, then on opening the Vote Export file, less information will be found as to whether the vote is fake or real.

At present, there has been no proven or advanced method to distinguish between real votes and those votes, which are faking in online voting competitions. The only possible and simple method is to access the Vote Export file from your winner dashboard and check the IP addresses for genuine and fake profiles. A close check on the IP addresses in certain platforms like Google or other IP checking website makes you understand at what rate or speed they are coming or how genuine are the accounts on social networking sites.

Exceptional cases

In certain cases however, there may be exceptions for some accounts. A number of votes coming from the same IP address may not necessarily be fakes. In offices or work environments, or even in schools, colleges and homes, more than one computer is generally used, which may have the same IP address. So one should be careful and think about all situations, before understanding whether the vote is genuine or fake.

How to remove fake votes?

In case you see a number of IP addresses which are from unusual locations or foreign countries, then you may suspect them of being illegal or fraud. You may search up the IP addresses in various platforms to find out the identity or location, or directly message the user. If you suspect them to be fake vote then you may directly message the user or remove the fake users, according to your own voting competition rules.

One of the best ways to guarantee real votes is by setting the voting guidelines to ‘one vote per user’. This is particularly helpful at is allows one to check the voting sources and control the voting population. This will help you to check the profile of the concerned voter and also obtain the IP address to allow further tracing of their identity, in case you consider them to be illegal or fake.

Online voting, despite its various advantages and benefits, also comes with a number of safety and legal issues. One should be careful and keep a check as to from where the votes are coming from and how real the addresses and IDs are.