Show HN: Presidential polling with instant electoral results

4 points by jkarneges a day ago

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