Why do you require participating users to provide their street address?
We require street address for three reasons:
- Users need to see the correlation between positions and distance from a local issue. For example, if a tally is split 50-50, but nearly all the "Yes" participants live more than a mile away from a local issue while nearly all the "No" participants live within a mile, then it is critical that decision makers have that information. Street addresses enable us to calculate distance for those cases.
- Most users who subscribe to email update services are not interested in emails about local issues which are miles away on the other side of town. Street addresses enable us to decide which emails are local to which users - and to give users the option to select what email to receive.
- There is no foolproof way of preventing identity fraud in online polling. Our objective is to collect enough information so that the risk of fraud widespread enough to significantly alter the tally is acceptably small. Street addresses are an important piece of information which help us reach that objective.
