Voting online has never been this easy when you have platforms such as Strawpolls, Facebook contests, or Twitter giveaways to express your opinion on certain things. However, question marks hang over the fairness of these polls to everyone.
These question marks are due to some participants using automated bots, proxies, VPNs, tweaking cookies, and other forms to manipulate the poll results. This article will teach you the various tools, including proxies, to automate poll results.
Before I proceed, I would like to provide a word of caution. We never encourage cheating or other malicious acts when you’re engaged in online polls. The techniques here show the power of proxies and show the reader the reality of online voting systems.
So without further ado, Let’s jump in.
However, tech-savvy Strawpoll users found a way to change their IP addresses using all or some of the following methods.
So now you have a clear overview of how to manipulate the votes by masking your IP address. While it is beyond the scope of this post to explain how to mask your IP address, here is an interesting read where you can learn more about how to do so:
However, I must make it clear that by merely masking your IP address from the methods mentioned above, you”ll not be able to vote an enormous volume of votes. At best, you”ll achieve fewer votes than your initial vote.
Using residential proxies in conjunction with a Strawpoll bot might be an excellent strategy for generating thousands of votes. Before we get into that, let’s look at some of the technical issues in voting websites that simplify voting manipulation.
Although we’re not living in the early days of building web forms, such as in 2005 or 2006, there might still be novice web developers who built forms with the GET method neglecting the higher levels of risk it involves.
When using the GET method, all the form fields that a user fills will be appended as a query string at the end of the URL. For example, if some website has an online poll and its forms action attribute is set to process_form.php, then this is how it will append the data:
Such a voter would navigate to this URL and click on the refresh icon in the browser tab multiple times. If the website tracks the cookies and IP address, it could delete the cookies and hide the IP address using some of the methods discussed above. Then every click of this refresh icon includes votes. Let’s hope for the best that online polls will never be built in such a manner.
You can create multiple accounts for some polls that require you to sign in. This method to generate more votes can be daunting as it depends on the websites’ mechanisms to authenticate you. Most websites send an email to the user’s inbox to verify themselves with a link to the voting page.
In the below section, you’ll find out how email hacks can help you in such a scenario.
Certain poll websites do not require strict email confirmations. Then users would be able to exploit it in several ways using some email hacks. For instance, if you own a domain, you can create an alias email address for one email account.
On the other hand, users can generate thousands of emails for any Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, or email address with any domain name, adding a “+” symbol after the name just before the “@” symbol.
For example, if you have a Gmail account in the name of [email protected], then when you’re registering for a poll, you can sign in with [email protected]. This would still generate a mail to user James Thoma’s inbox.
Now let’s move on to the exciting bit of how you could generate votes on a large scale using voting bots and proxies.
Using bots in online platforms such as Strawpoll could automate the bot to do some of the voters’ actions. These are the bots signing into an account, then browsing around the poll and clicking on the vote or submit button without being suspicious. They would even like a post without causing doubts in the site administrator’s mind.
However, the bot alone would not produce productive results. It would help if you integrated them with proxies, as you shall discover in a forthcoming section. Platforms like Strawpoll can also ban bots if they find suspicious activities. Nevertheless, Starwpoll has never been successful at halting the bots entirely. It’s because automation experts have created bots in a way to be unrecognizable from browsers.
On the other hand, when you have a large proxy pool operating with a bot, it’s almost impossible to stop them.
Strawpoll bot is a voting bot for the Strawpoll developed in Python 3. x. They work well on Mac, Windows, and Linux. These voting bots operate on polls such as IP Limitation Checking polls or polls that limit the participants to one vote by IP address. They also work on No Limitation Checking polls. The only downside is that they are not successful on polls that have captcha protection.
So to set up the bot, you would need the poll id and the target value. Let’s say the poll URL you want your bot to vote on is https://strawpoll.de/text2. Here text2 is the id of the poll. Then to find the target value, you need to right-click the check box you want the bot to vote for. Then find the value that starts with “check.” For instance, check897654, which is the ID of the checkbox.
You now understand what automated vote bots are. Let’s look at the types of proxies you’ll need for online polls.
As I have mentioned numerous times in this article, most polls limit a vote per IP address. Therefore you would need innumerable proxies to vote multiple times. Another reason for using proxies is to bypass the geo-restrictions. Some Strawpoll polls are not available in certain countries; hence, if you reside outside of regions in which Strawpoll is not allowed, you would not be able to vote. However, with a proxy, you would connect to a country where Strawpoll is supported.
Thus the best proxies for online polls would be residential proxies.
The most apparent reason for the choice is that they are the IP addresses of actual residential owners. As a result, the poll website owners will not detect any suspicious activity, such as vote manipulation.
Out of the residential proxies, you would need rotating residential proxies, also known as the back-connect rotating proxies. Since you must vote multiple times, the rotating proxies will conceal your identity behind a proxy pool.
There are also pretty fast datacenter proxies. However, many polling sites can detect that you’re hiding behind a proxy. On the same token, VPNs might be suitable for one or two automated votes, but destination websites can easily detect them due to their redundant availability.
Besides, some websites, such as Strawpoll, have a robust VPN detection system.
Also, it would help if you never used public proxies with your bot because the IP address will be shared among several users, and most of them will go offline before switching your bot.
Choosing the right proxy provider is vital for selecting appropriate back-connect rotating proxies.
A dedicated datacenter proxy has several features, such as unlimited bandwidth and concurrent connections, dedicated HTTP proxies for easy communication, and IP authentication for more security. With 99.9% uptime, you can rest assured that the dedicated datacenter will always work during any session. Last but not least, ProxyScrape provides excellent customer service and will help you to resolve your issue within 24-48 business hours.
The other feature of ProxyScrape’s residential proxy is a rotating feature. A rotating proxy helps you avoid a permanent ban on your account because your residential proxy dynamically changes your IP address, making it difficult for the target server to check whether you are using a proxy or not.
Apart from that, the other features of a residential proxy are: unlimited bandwidth, along with concurrent connection, dedicated HTTP/s proxies, proxies at any time session because of 7 million plus proxies in the proxy pool, username and password authentication for more security, and last but not least, the ability to change the country server. You can select your desired server by appending the country code to the username authentication.
Next, the best thing would be to change the proxy server based on the country. You just have to append the country ISO_CODE at the end of the IP authentication or username and password authentication.
Some of the Strawpoll bots that you looked into above have an option for configuring proxies, mainly in the form of a text file. The proxies are in the form of a list, as you need to have more than one proxy to vote multiple times. So it would appear that the target website as requests originates from several users.
The answer is the residential proxy. Residential proxies are much more suitable because they have the ability to rotate your IP address automatically, and you can choose which country you want by simply appending the ISO_CODE at the end of the proxy authentication.
Most online polls can detect that you are using a proxy due to redundancy availability. You need a proxy that can cycle its IP address automatically, and a residential proxy does the job here. Also, with residential proxies, the target server accepts your IP address since the addresses are from actual homeowners.
You can create multiple accounts with an email hack. Appending the “+” sign before the “@” will help to register in the online vote booth, and all the mail will still be directed to your inbox.
After going through this comprehensive article, we hope that you have understood how online voting manipulation works. As stated earlier, our intention is not to teach you some malicious acts but to educate you on the flaws in online voting systems such as Strawpolls.
Therefore we hope that you”ll challenge the credibility of some online voting platforms using bots and proxies rather than break the system by unethical means.
