I have received a handful of questions about the security of our onlinepolls today and over the weekend - so thought it best to post an answerhere in case others have similar concerns:

To start - we are aware of the potential for abuse, and as a result monitor voting patterns on a hourly/daily basis.

Below you can see the votes received per day from June to September 2006. On average, a poll will receive 150 - 200 votes per day. A very popular question may receive up to 300. The exception, the two spikes at the end of the chart were the two questions regarding Dr Earl’s employment status.

In terms of security, the Telegaph’s (and the hundred other newspapers using the SaxoTech content management system) options are limited to setting a cookie on the reader’s hard drive which restricts repeat voting on the same question. Any reader who takes the time to delete the cookie, or log-in from a different computer, will be able to vote twice, or two thousand times if so inclined.

However, juding by the overall track record of these polls, we believe people generally have good intentions, and in a year, we have only identified three incidents of tampering, two of which were last week.

Is that a serious problem? Yes and no.

In any public online forum a certain amount of pranksterism is to be expected. We likely can not identify if one person votes 3 times, or even 10 times. Fortunately, that level of abuse is not typically enough to skew the results. Along with the fact that these polls are not scientific, nor should they be considered to be, we are fairly comfortable the polls serve their purpose, which is to generate interest and conversation around the news of the day.

This has been our long-term policy on the subject and in the past there was a disclaimer to that effect posted with the polls. Unfortunately during one redesign or the other, a link to the disclaimer was lost from the front page and was therefore of little use.

This afternoon we returned the link and the explanation of the poll to its rightful place (below the poll on the front page) and a copy is also below.

In addition, in order to reduce future problems, we have brought the poll back behind the Telegraph registration wall. In short, you must be logged in to vote. This will no doubt serve to reduce reader participation and interest in the polls, but it will also allow us to more closely identify repeat voters if another concerted effort is made to game the system.

Our preference is to not have the polls behind registration, so we will evaluate this policy again in the near future.

————————
Poll Disclaimer

Nashuatelegraph.com online polls are not intended to be a scientific sample of local or national opinion. Instead, they are a way for readers to share their views on the news with Telegraph reporters and editors and with fellow Web site users.

Respondents are not randomly selected, but select themselves to vote on a specific question. In addition, while NashuaTelegraph online polls are designed to allow only one vote per user, savvy users may find ways around this limitation. We do monitor the results and will remove polls we feel are being manipulated. For these reasons, the polls are not presented as scientific surveys or as representative of the opinion of the general population of our readership areas, the region or the nation.