When conducting a competition or voting, it is most important to us that its results are objective. This will not happen if one person is able to vote for more than one candidate or vice versa - the same option will have a chance to win a lot of votes from one participant. Another threat is the possibility of voters setting up an fake e-mail accounts and thus scoring additional points for their favorites.

Fortunately, there is an easy way to prevent this from happening by voting using the Startquestion platform. It is the verification of the e-mail address.

How to do it?

We will need two questionnaires for the proper conduct of the competition. First things first.

We create a typical contest / voting questionnaire form. We are the first to ask a competition question, for example:

We add another page where we ask the second (and last) question for the email address:

In the on thank you page (Create tab, under adding questions), we inform the respondent that an e-mail will be sent to his e-mail address asking for confirmation:

After adding the questions, go to the Create tab -> Survey settings and choose the access by one link for everyone:

It is in this questionnaire that we will collect the binding voting results.

We create a new survey (Create a project) and choose the Copy one of my surveys option:

Then we choose the first questionnaire created a moment ago.

Question #1 will be identical, so all we need to do is go to the Create tab and change the question #2, giving it, for example, the following content:

This question is to verify the confirmation, so its content may be, for example: Do you confirm your choice? It should be a single choice question.

After entering the questions, go to Create --> Survey settings. In the access section, check Personal link for each respondent and ON in respondent identification:

Step 3 - Email after filling out

After you finish creating the second survey, go to the Projects tab in your account, and then select the survey you created first from the list.
Then go to the Create --> E-mail after completion tab, where you mark the status: Active

We enter the subject of the e-mail addressed to people who participated in the survey, and then we determine its content. Our goal is to confirm that you have voted, so the content has to:

· create a link on which the respondent has to click to confirm the survey

To do this, click on the insert / edit link icon and paste the address of the previously created survey #2 there (you can find it in the Share tab), adding the question mark and the user token parameter with the answers given. The link might look like this:

https://www.startquestion.com/survey/445044/voting-for-employee-of-the-year.html?user_token=[ANS_2]&q1=[ANS_NR_1]&q2=1

You can read about how to create such a link in a separate article in our tutorial.

In the text of the message, we can also add, for example, the name of the person for whom the respondent voted, using the ANS ID macro (Dynamic content -> Answer from question #1). You can read more about the creation and types of ANS macros in a separate article.

Remember: in this case use ANS_NR, not ANS_ID!

And... this is it. The link to the survey with the voting may be sent to the respondents.

The message which will be sent to the respondent after completing the survey may look like this:

After the confirmation, the respondent's screen will display the message you set earlier, for example:

· you invite all of the participants to take part in the survey in questionnaire #1 - the appropriate voting,

· counting votes and analysis of results should be conducted on questionnaire #2 (confirming),

· e-mail verification will not allow one person to vote for more than one candidate.