Hi HN!<p>This is an experiment with low-friction, "fearless", Internet-based polling. There is no authentication, only a captcha and restriction to US IP addresses. Congressional district is detected automatically. Selections can be changed at any time until the poll closes, kind of like a presidential caucus. Just tap to select. Tap again to change.<p>I built this after pondering about how polling (or even voting) could be improved through technology. Yes, digital voting is a tough space with trust issues. Maybe there are practical, partial solutions.<p>This is my third post. Earlier submissions didn't perform well, probably because politics is a sensitive subject. However, this project is not political. It is about tech and process. I believe it's an appropriate submission for HN and it ought to be interesting no matter your political leaning. Hopefully with this better framing there can be better discussion.<p>Another way of looking at it: if the poll results bother you, think about how improving polling/voting generally might help your cause.<p>Here are some topics to guide constructive discussion:<p>* Internet-based polling. Can we make this a routine thing? Would it be worthwhile? Abuse prevention?<p>* Internet-based voting. About time or never gonna happen?<p>* Augmenting the voting experience. We don't have ranked choice voting, but maybe it could be simulated in advance of an election. Maybe an organization could act as a delivery agent for mail-in votes.<p>* The tech stack. This project uses a combination of boring (Django+Postgres) and shiny (Fastly edge pub/sub, captcha, etc). The database ought to be able to handle a few million participants. To get to a few hundred million I'd probably add more PG nodes and shard. Curious what others think about the database options for accurate+fast counting.<p>* Have fun with it! This isn't a real election. If you want to VPN to an empty state to claim a bunch of electoral votes, go for it. I hope with enough participants the results would be mostly representative, though.<p>The poll will run every Monday afternoon/evening until Election Day. It's designed to withstand a good bit of traffic so feel free to share it.<p>Earlier posts:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41630976">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41630976</a>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41555752">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41555752</a>
The problem with polling is getting a representative sample of the target population, which this doesn't address any of the problems with, and there is no IP-based geolocation method that is accurate enough to reliably place a user in a particular congressional district even if they aren't doing something like using a VPN. There’s a couple major markets where it will probably be unreliable as to state, as well as Congressional district.<p>> Internet-based polling. Can we make this a routine thing?<p>Internet-based polling is already routine.<p>> Internet-based voting. About time or never gonna happen?<p>What problem is this envisioned as solving?
> You are outside of the United States and cannot participate. However, you can still watch the results!<p>I'm in Colorado, slap bang in the middle of the USA, connecting via AT&T, not running a VPN. Are you using Fastly for geolocation? If so, that's... bad...