Great and again, I don’t think we need to redo this poll. I’m bringing up issues for the future.
I disagree, I think we have some great options for mitigating this. You checking accounts created after the poll is already an awesome first step: “you must have an account created before the poll started in order to vote” could be a great policy that mitigates the temptation to create a new account for a vote on a topic someone feels very strongly about.
Another could be “you need at least 10 hearts from members who already have voter-status”. I can go make 10 burner accounts, but its a lot harder to make 10 burner accounts, make posts from all of them, and collect 10 hearts for the first one, 9 for the second one (using burner for the 10th), 8 for the third, 7 for the fourth … Etc. AND, thats way less of a “temptation” and more like a well-thought out plot by a bad actor, which I think makes it both less likely to happen, and more likely that the bad actor is eventually caught.
Another mitigation could be requring a phone number.
Whatever the policy is, I think Aux should have an official policy. There is the risk that you looked at the new accounts just now and saw “jeff2,jeff3,jeff4,jeff5”. We should solve that BEFORE it happens (while we are small and do have good people) because once it happens, ad-hoc throwing accounts out is a pretty bad and pretty difficult.
This discussion I think warrents a new thread.