Accounts and participation

Democratia draws a line between reading a poll and acting on it.

Reading needs no account. Anyone can open the home page, browse the public poll directory, read a public poll, see which phase it is in and when it closes, see its options when the phase allows, read published results, and read the public rankings. None of that asks who you are.

Acting needs an account. Voting, suggesting an option, creating a poll, accepting an invitation to a private poll and earning points all require you to be signed in.

Why the line is drawn there

Every rule Democratia makes about fairness depends on knowing that two ballots came from two people. One ballot per participant, one option per contributor, points that cannot be farmed — none of these mean anything without a stable identity behind them.

Before this rule, a public poll admitted anyone holding the link and recognised returning visitors by a token in a browser cookie. That worked, and the documentation was honest about its limits, but the limits were real: it identified a browser, not a person. Clearing the cookie, opening a private window or using a second device produced a second participant with a second vote.

Requiring an account does not make ballot-stuffing impossible — somebody determined enough can create several accounts — but it raises the cost from "open a private window" to "confirm another email address", and it gives an organiser something to look at when a result seems wrong.

What it looks like in practice

When you open a poll you are not signed in for, you can read all of it. Where there is something to do — voting is open, or options are being collected — the page offers to sign you in instead of a ballot.

Following that link remembers where you were. After signing in, or registering, you land back on the poll you came from rather than on your dashboard, so a link shared in a group chat still works in one pass.

You do not join a poll as a separate step. Opening the ballot, or contributing your first option, joins you to it using the name on your profile.

Your name

Anything you contribute is attributed to your account and shown with the name on your profile — when the organiser chose to credit contributors at all. You are never asked to type a name alongside a suggestion, and a name sent in a request is ignored: attribution is read from your account, not from the form.

This means renaming yourself updates every option you have ever suggested. That is deliberate. The alternative — freezing a copy of your name beside each contribution — leaves old polls calling you something you no longer go by.

Participants from before this rule

Polls that ran under the old rules still have their ballots, and those ballots still count.

A participant from that era has no account, so their record holds only the display name they chose and the hash of a cookie whose plaintext no longer exists anywhere. Democratia keeps them:

• their ballots are still counted, in every total and towards turnout;
• their suggested options are still listed, still credited to the name they gave;
• results that name participants label them plainly as predating accounts, rather than presenting them as members of the platform.

What they cannot do is earn points, because there is no account to credit — and no new participant of that shape can be created. If you are reading an old poll and wondering why a name has no profile behind it, this is why.

What this does not prevent

Requiring an account still does not prevent somebody from registering twice and voting twice in a public poll, and Democratia does not claim otherwise. If a poll's result would be damaged by that, do not make it public: make it private and invite the specific people entitled to vote. A private poll admits exactly the accounts on its invitation list and nobody else.

See Private polls for how that works, and Points for the rules that keep the scoring honest.