Desmond Seales Cayman Net News Publisher and Editor-in-Chief

Cayman Net News has reintroduced its online poll after a break of some three years.

Desmond Seales, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, explained, “We decided to discontinue the poll in early 2005, following attempted manipulation of the voting, and therefore the results, by supporters of the United Democratic Party (UDP).”

Other local efforts at online polling have also encountered the same difficulties from time to time because the process itself is inherently vulnerable to multiple voting, no matter what safeguards are put in place.

Although the new Cayman Net News poll does have some conventional measures to prevent multiple voting, such as IP monitoring and banning, a new approach has been taken to enhance the credibility of the results by introducing the concept of authenticated votes.

All votes are now verified using an email address that the voter provides and an authentication code is sent to that address, which requires the voter to click in order to authenticate the vote cast.

If the voter has used a non-existent email address, then the vote in question will be considered unauthenticated.

Voting results will therefore be categorised into authenticated and unauthenticated, along with such information as age, location, gender, and whether or not a registered voter.

A commenting system has also been integrated into the poll to encourage users to interact and discuss the current poll question. Comments will, however, need to be verified before they are posted.

The online poll can be accessed through the newspaper’s main website or directly at http://polls.caymannetnews.com.