GloboPoll blog · Behind the scenes
Why we built GloboPoll
Polls voted ten times, forms nobody fills in and results nobody trusts: that is where GloboPoll came from. Here is what we decided and why.
· Cibernatural · 4 min read
We have spent years building websites and systems for news outlets, town councils and small companies, and one request keeps coming back: "we want to ask our people something and find out what they think". It sounds simple. It is not.
The problem we saw
Almost everyone ends up in one of three places. The quick poll on a social network or a free service, where the same person votes ten times from a private window and the result is worthless. The long form, carefully designed and hardly ever completed, because it asks people to sign up or runs to twenty questions. Or the professional tool that charges per response, built for marketing departments with a budget, which a local newspaper or an association cannot afford.
In all three cases the result has the same flaw: you cannot trust it. And a vote nobody can trust is worse than not asking at all, because whoever loses has every reason to doubt it.
What we decided
GloboPoll grew out of a short list of decisions, taken before the first line of code was written:
- One vote per person, enforced in the database. Not a check on the screen that a script can skip: a constraint in the database itself. Without an account we count by address and by a technical fingerprint of the browser; with an account, by person. If two votes arrive at the same time, only one gets in.
- Six languages from day one. Spanish, English, German, French, Italian and Portuguese, with a domain per country. Each poll is written in one language and shown to whoever browses in that language, in any of the countries.
- Live results, with a date. Voters see the count straight away, and every poll page states how many votes there are and when they were counted, so a figure quoted elsewhere can be checked.
- No tracking cookies. No pixels, no advertising, no data sold. Usage statistics are our own and group people by a daily hash that cannot be reversed.
- Human moderation. A person reviews every poll before it goes public. It is slow compared with "publish and go", but it keeps the catalogue clean and stops anyone using the platform for what it is not.
- A widget that always leads back to the platform. A poll can be embedded in any website. The widget shows only the count and carries a footer linking to GloboPoll; the detail lives here. The outlet that embeds it gains participation, and we gain people knowing who counts the votes.
What exists today
When someone asks us to describe the service in one paragraph, this is the one we use everywhere, word for word:
GloboPoll is an online platform for creating polls and votes, sharing them with a link or embedding them in a website, and watching the results live. It counts one vote per person, allows anonymous voting without sign-up, reviews every poll before it is published and works in six languages (Spanish, English, German, French, Italian and Portuguese). Creating polls and voting is free; the Pro plan adds the website widget, the results API, webhook alerts and ranking, point-allocation and pairwise-comparison ballots and knockout brackets. It is developed by Cibernatural S.L. (Lanzarote, Spain).
Behind that paragraph are eight kinds of ballot: single choice, multiple choice, yes / no / abstain, rating (stars, scale or NPS), ranking (Borda, instant runoff and Condorcet), point allocation (quadratic too), pairwise comparison (Elo and Copeland) and knockout brackets. Results can be hidden until the poll closes, votes can be changed while it is open, options can carry images, there is an "Other" option with free text and, as of this week, invitation-only votes: single-use codes for boards and associations that need to know only the right people voted.
If you want to see it working, here is a real poll from the catalogue. Vote and see what everyone else sees:
Vote in the poll: «Do you use artificial intelligence tools in your daily life?»
What comes next
Next on the list are questionnaires (several questions in one poll, with conditional logic), an electoral roll uploaded as a file for anyone with a closed list of eligible voters, and secret ballots with a receipt and an exportable record, designed for town councils and professional bodies. Every piece that ships will get its post on this blog the same day it is deployed: that is this section's commitment.
Where to go from here
You can create a poll for free in a couple of minutes, read how it works or write to us if you run a news outlet, a council or an association and want to try the widget on your site. And if anything above strikes you as the wrong call, we want to hear that too.