Two worries come up when leaders think about opening a vote to their people. Will people be honest if they are not anonymous? And will someone game the result? Both are fair. Here is how a vote can be built to answer them.
Anonymity: what the organizer sees
Organizers see results, not who voted for what. A vote is never shown with a name beside it.
Participants join from a link. They do not need an account, and no one asks for a name or email. The site stores a random code in the browser so it can remember them within that project, and that is all.
Two details worth knowing:
- Personal links. If you send each person their own link, you know who you sent it to. You can see who has joined. You still cannot see how they voted.
- Small groups. If you split results by team or office, groups of fewer than five are never shown. That stops anyone from being picked out of a small group.
Gaming: what stops it
The aim is simple. No one should be able to push their own idea to the top, or push a rival idea down.
- Authors never see their own ideas in a vote. You cannot vote for yourself.
- Pairs, not lists. People compare two ideas at a time. Voting for everything you like is not possible, and a single vote moves an idea only a little.
- Vote caps and pacing. A limit on how many votes one person or one network address can cast, and a pace to the voting, make it hard to flood the result.
- Personal links. When an organizer sends personal links, each link is one person, which makes ballot-stuffing harder still.
None of this makes a result tamper-proof. A determined group that coordinates can still lean on it. What these features do is make casual gaming impractical and give you a sense of how solid the result is. Each idea shows how many comparisons it rests on, so a result from a few dozen votes looks different from one that rests on thousands.
What about bad content?
People can flag an idea. After three flags it is hidden, and the organizer can review it and decide. Organizers can also set blocked words for a project.
Names on ideas
An idea's author stays anonymous unless three things are true: the idea finishes in the top ten, the project has ended, and the author has agreed. Then the author can be credited. This gives credit where people want it without making anyone give up anonymity to take part.
A fair expectation
Anonymity is what lets quieter people give an honest answer, and fairness is what lets everyone trust the result. Neither one is complete on its own. If people think the vote can be bought, they will not take part. If they think they will be identified, they will not be honest.
Tell your group, in the invitation, what is and is not visible. A single clear sentence does more for participation than any feature.