[DeepDish]

My company wants to put up a page where people vote for thier favorite whatever.

We want only one set of votes per valid e-mail address.

There will be around 20 catagories, where they can fill in any answer per catagory.

I want the ballot web-form e-mailed to me.

Then maybe a mail deamon to reply and request verifacation that it was a valid e-mail address.

Then once verified, the results would be added to the totals.

Any advice? Any shareware out there to help me out? Is a mail deamon what I really want? What about cookies or java script to help automate this project.

Thank you,
DD

[SPiNdustrious]

Cookies and JavaScript won't be too rigorous because someone could always fill out the survey again in a different browser or from another computer. Nothing prevents them from voting twice using a second valid email address either.

Why are people going to be filling out this survey? Is it something your company is asking clients or propective clients to do? Or is it something for casual web visitors?

If it is something you are specifically asking them to do, send each client a personalized email asking them to fill out this survey at http://www.your-company.com/survey?id=sakj345nb354, where "sakj345nb354" is a random string that is matched to that client in a database. Once they've completed the survey, they'd be locked out and would probably not try to guess the code assigned to someone else.

It's much harder authenticating the ballots for casual web surfers. In the above scenario, you would be effectively pre-authenticating the ballots, which is just fine since you know who should be taking the survey. There no logical scheme, whether it be IP address-email address matching or something else, that will guarantee the validity of casual internet voters.

There's an internet voting system that might shed some light on this. It was developed as an alternative to traditional ballot box voting but was abandoned when the developer realized that securing the server completely was impossible. http://www.free-project.org/

Peter

[DeepDish]

For the past 10 years people would fill out a ballot one a year for a best of promotion.

But we want to move it to be available to the web as well as mail in form

We don't mind people voting more than once, as along as each ballot mailed in has a real, non-photocopied signature.

For the web, we will require an unique e-mail address.

I like your idea, they send me there e-mail, then I mail them a specail code to go vote or include the ballot in the e-mail itself.

I will think about both of those ideas.

Thank you,
DD