Show HN: Presidential polling with instant electoral results

Show HN: Presidential polling with instant electoral results(ileantoward.com)

4 points by jkarneges 1 year ago | 8 comments

Hi HN!

This is an experiment with low-friction, "fearless", Internet-based polling. There is no authentication, only a captcha and restriction to US IP addresses. Congressional district is detected automatically. Selections can be changed at any time until the poll closes, kind of like a presidential caucus. Just tap to select. Tap again to change.

I built this after pondering about how polling (or even voting) could be improved through technology. Yes, digital voting is a tough space with trust issues. Maybe there are practical, partial solutions.

This is my third post. Earlier submissions didn't perform well, probably because politics is a sensitive subject. However, this project is not political. It is about tech and process. I believe it's an appropriate submission for HN and it ought to be interesting no matter your political leaning. Hopefully with this better framing there can be better discussion.

Another way of looking at it: if the poll results bother you, think about how improving polling/voting generally might help your cause.

Here are some topics to guide constructive discussion:

* Internet-based polling. Can we make this a routine thing? Would it be worthwhile? Abuse prevention?

* Internet-based voting. About time or never gonna happen?

* Augmenting the voting experience. We don't have ranked choice voting, but maybe it could be simulated in advance of an election. Maybe an organization could act as a delivery agent for mail-in votes.

* The tech stack. This project uses a combination of boring (Django+Postgres) and shiny (Fastly edge pub/sub, captcha, etc). The database ought to be able to handle a few million participants. To get to a few hundred million I'd probably add more PG nodes and shard. Curious what others think about the database options for accurate+fast counting.

* Have fun with it! This isn't a real election. If you want to VPN to an empty state to claim a bunch of electoral votes, go for it. I hope with enough participants the results would be mostly representative, though.

The poll will run every Monday afternoon/evening until Election Day. It's designed to withstand a good bit of traffic so feel free to share it.

Earlier posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41630976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41555752

dragonwriter 1 year ago |

The problem with polling is getting a representative sample of the target population, which this doesn't address any of the problems with, and there is no IP-based geolocation method that is accurate enough to reliably place a user in a particular congressional district even if they aren't doing something like using a VPN. There’s a couple major markets where it will probably be unreliable as to state, as well as Congressional district.

> Internet-based polling. Can we make this a routine thing?

Internet-based polling is already routine.

> Internet-based voting. About time or never gonna happen?

What problem is this envisioned as solving?

jkarneges 1 year ago | |

I agree it has some problems. For now, it is mostly a UX proof-of-concept and probably not how an official poll should be conducted.

> What problem is this envisioned as solving?

Its core mission is to legitimize all candidates on the ballot. This is something caucuses and ranked-choice voting can do, but since our general elections don't work this way, I wonder if the voting experience could be augmented from the private sector. (Of course, efforts to change how our actual elections work is still worthwhile and can be pursued in parallel).

Basically, if enough people (millions) were to use an app like this to meta-vote before committing to a single actual vote, we could simulate alternative voting processes without government involvement.

KeychainPirate 1 year ago | |

OP works for Fastly, they're pushing a lot of "demos" like this in the hopes that one of them goes viral because nobody is using their serverless platform. Don't waste your time adding engagement to it, all they want is a few threads mentioning Fastly that don't mention the June 8th incident from 2021.

jkarneges 1 year ago | | |

It's a proof-of-concept for a potential startup idea, not endorsed by my employer. I simply picked tech in arms reach.

Maybe in 2028 this could be a real thing, regardless of where it is running. An edge cloud does seem ideal for national live events though.

RangerBerryCola 1 year ago |

> You are outside of the United States and cannot participate. However, you can still watch the results!

I'm in Colorado, slap bang in the middle of the USA, connecting via AT&T, not running a VPN. Are you using Fastly for geolocation? If so, that's... bad...

jkarneges 1 year ago | |

Hmm. Yes, using Fastly for that. Can you go to https://ileantoward.com/geotest and see if anything looks fishy? Notably country_code and region (region should have a state code if country is "US").

RangerBerryCola 1 year ago | | |

Says I'm in El Salvador (Country Code: SV)

I don't have much confidence in Fastly's WAF if it can't do basic geolocation in 2024