GloboPoll blog · News
Blocking VPNs and proxies in anonymous voting
New polls reject anonymous votes that come through a VPN, a proxy or the Tor network. What gets blocked, what does not, and how to turn it off.
· Cibernatural · 2 min read
On GloboPoll, people who vote without an account vote once: the vote is counted per connection and per browser. The weak spot of that rule is well known. A VPN hands out a new connection every time it is switched on, and in a controversial poll someone will always use that to vote again.
From today, polls can reject anonymous votes that come through a VPN, a proxy or the Tor network. The option is on for new polls and one checkbox turns it off.
What gets blocked
- Commercial VPNs and public proxies.
- Tor exit nodes.
- Connections coming out of a data centre, which is where automated scripts vote from.
Anyone voting that way sees a clear message: "This poll does not accept votes through a VPN or proxy. Turn it off and vote again". If the poll accepts votes with an account, they can also sign in and vote with it.
What does not get blocked
- Votes with an account or an invitation. There, one vote per person does not depend on the connection, so you can vote with your VPN on.
- iCloud Private Relay, Safari's privacy feature on iPhone and Mac. Its connections sit in the same lists as VPNs, and we exclude them one by one.
- Mobile and home networks, even when many people share a connection.
What we store
Nothing new. The check runs on our servers, without sending your connection to third parties, and we do not record who was using a VPN: we only count how many votes were rejected, to make sure we are not blocking people we should not.
How to change it
In the editor, Settings tab, checkbox "Block votes from VPNs and proxies". In trial polls without an account, the checkbox is in the form itself. Polls that already existed stay as they were: if you want the block on one of them, turn it on there.
It is free on every plan. No block of this kind is perfect, and if your poll needs a stronger guarantee, what provides it is voting with an account or with a single-use invitation.