HomePHP Page 4 - Creating a Fraud-proof Voting System
Trust but Verify - PHP
Setting up polls or voting systems is a great way to get users more involved in your website, and keep them coming back for more. But with fraud hanging over the professional political elections, how do you keep your visitors from screaming for a recount--or worse, stuffing the ballot box? Ian Felton describes a simple system for setting up an online poll and preventing abuses.
Now that there is a vote in the system, we need a simple verification script that will determine if the vote is legitimate. We’ll call this script, Verify.php. It looks like this:
//Select the database mysql_select_db($database, $db); //Update the record to set the Boolean flag to true if the timestamp in the verification email matches the timestamp in the database record. $selectSQL = sprintf("UPDATE votes set pending=1 where bandID=%s AND email=%s AND time=%s", GetSQLValueString($_GET['band'], "int"), GetSQLValueString($_GET['email'], "text"), GetSQLValueString($_GET['time'], "text")); $Result2 = mysql_query($selectSQL, $UB_DATA); //Message for voter. $messages = "Thanks for voting. Remember, you can only vote once a day for a band , but you can vote for as many bands a day as you want.";
This completes the general design of a fraud-proof voting system. There are a few ways to get around this system. ‘Fraud-proof’ is used in the general sense. Dick could obviously go around from computer to computer in the White House and keep voting for his favorite band. There’s some other ways around this system too, but I’ll let you figure that out. However, with this basic design, a voting system that prevents the basest level of fraud can be setup to your specific purpose relatively simply. Happy voting
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