Picking our poison: The trade-offs of tracking
IP-based fingerprinting
Hash the voter's IP to restrict votes to one per IP.
Except not really. A university campus shares one public IP. An entire office behind a corporate NAT looks like a single user. You just locked out hundreds of legitimate voters. On the flip side, anyone with a VPN rotates their IP in seconds and votes again.
It works well enough for casual polls where the stakes are low. It falls apart the moment someone actually wants to game it.
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