Verified, unverified and IP-diverse votes
Every contest that asks for a vote also decides, quietly, how hard that vote should be to fake. Some ask for nothing more than a click. Others expect a working phone number, a confirmed inbox, or an account with a history behind it. None of these checks proves a voter cares about the outcome, each one only proves a different, narrower thing, and knowing which is which changes what a supplier can honestly offer.
No check at all
A contest with no verification step counts a click and nothing else. There's no login, no cookie, no confirmation message, just a button connected directly to a counter. This is the cheapest tier to build, which is why it shows up on quick brand giveaways and single-page polls thrown together in an afternoon, and it's also the tier where a click and a vote are functionally the same event.
What it proves is exactly one thing: a browser reached the page and pressed the button. It doesn't establish that a person made a considered choice, that the same visitor hasn't already pressed it twice, or that the click came from anywhere near the audience the contest is meant to be measuring. An organizer who chooses this tier has decided, whether they say so or not, that keeping the barrier to entry at zero matters more than catching abuse.
A cookie in the browser
A step up from nothing is a cookie set the first time someone votes and checked on every later attempt from the same browser. It stops the laziest kind of repeat click, hitting the button five times in a row without leaving the page, without asking a visitor to do anything they'd notice.
What it proves is that a specific browser, on a specific device, has voted before. That's a narrower claim than it sounds. Clearing cookies, opening a private window, or switching from a phone to a laptop resets the count entirely, and none of those actions require any real effort or technical skill. A cookie identifies a browser session, not a person, and a contest that treats the two as equivalent is measuring something closer to browser instances than supporters.
An account that already exists
Some contests require a login before a vote is accepted, not a new account created on the spot, but one with a history: prior posts, existing followers, an account age that predates the contest by more than a few hours. This tier raises the cost of an attempt sharply, because standing up an account with a believable history takes real time in a way that a bare email field or an anonymous click never does.
That difference is the whole point. A fresh account can be created in under a minute; an account that looks like it's been active for months cannot be manufactured quickly at any real scale, no matter what's paid for it. A platform that checks for account age or history, rather than mere existence, is quietly requiring something closer to a real presence than any of the tiers below it, and that requirement doesn't disappear because a buyer wants it to.
An email that must be confirmed
Requiring a confirmed email adds a second action after the form: open a message, click a link, and only then does the vote register. It's a common middle tier because it costs an organizer almost nothing to add and it filters out the most careless kind of repeat entry without asking for anything a visitor would call intrusive.
What it actually confirms is narrower than it sounds: that an inbox exists and that someone with access to it clicked a link. It says nothing about who that someone is, whether they read past the subject line, or whether they care in any way about the outcome the vote is meant to express. An engaged supporter and someone clicking through a dozen confirmation messages without reading any of them look identical to this check, because the check was never built to tell them apart, only to confirm a working inbox stands behind the address typed into the form.
A phone number
A smaller share of contests ask for a phone number instead of, or alongside, an email, usually verified with a one-time code sent by text. This is a heavier ask than an email address, since most people hold far fewer phone numbers than inboxes, and replacing one takes more effort than opening a new webmail account ever does.
What it proves is possession of a working number at the moment the code arrived. It doesn't prove the number isn't a low-cost virtual line rented for exactly this purpose, and it doesn't prove the person holding the phone has any connection to the contest beyond that one text message. Like the email tier, it raises the floor without closing the gap between a confirmed number and a voter who genuinely cares about the outcome.
A captcha bolted onto any of the above
A captcha isn't its own tier so much as a layer that can sit in front of any of the ones above it. A contest with no other check can still run a captcha, and so can one that also requires a confirmed email or an established account. Its job is narrow: decide whether the request behaves like a script or like a browser with a person somewhere behind it.
That's a real filter, and it stops a category of automated submission the tiers above don't touch on their own. But it answers a different question than any of them. A captcha says nothing about whether a click came from a fresh account or an established one, an unconfirmed email or a verified phone number; it only says the request wasn't obviously automated. Stacking a captcha on top of a weak tier makes that tier harder to abuse at scale, not harder to abuse one click at a time.
The ladder, read in order
Laid out from loosest to strictest, the six checks form a rough ladder of friction rather than a scale of honesty. Each rung filters out a different kind of low-effort attempt while leaving a different kind of gap open above it:
- No check: confirms a click happened, nothing about who made it or whether it was the first.
- Cookie: confirms the same browser returned, reset by a private window or a cleared cache.
- Existing account: confirms a history that took real time to build, the hardest tier to fake at scale.
- Confirmed email: confirms an inbox exists and someone clicked a link inside it, nothing about intent.
- Phone number: confirms a working line at that moment, not that the line wasn't rented for the occasion.
- Captcha: confirms the request behaved like a browser, layered on top of any tier rather than replacing one.
Why the tier rarely shows up on the entry page
None of this gets published where a voter, or a buyer, can see it before acting. A form either asks for an email or it doesn't; it rarely explains that the email must be confirmed within a set window, or that the account behind a vote needs a history rather than just a username. The only reliable way to learn which tier is running is to read the form closely and, where they exist, the terms sitting behind it.
That gap between what's visible and what's actually checked is exactly where confusion creeps in. Two contests can look identical on screen, a name field, an email field, a submit button, while one confirms nothing beyond syntax and the other requires a working inbox with a real click behind it. Nothing on the page itself tells the two apart, which is precisely why guessing the tier from appearance alone is a habit worth dropping.
What the tier decides for a buyer
None of this is academic once money is involved. A contest running no check at all and a contest requiring a confirmed phone number aren't the same job with a different price tag attached, they're different jobs, because the tier decides what's even achievable before anything else does. An order built for the loosest tier doesn't scale cleanly onto the strictest one just because a client wants it to.
A supplier who quotes the same price and the same turnaround regardless of which tier a contest runs is skipping the part of the work that actually determines what's possible. Reading the entry form closely enough to know whether it's checking a cookie, an account, an email, or nothing at all isn't an optional courtesy; it's the first piece of information any honest quote depends on. A supplier who never asks which tier applies, or answers instantly without having looked, is telling a buyer something about how carefully the rest of the order gets handled too.
IP diversity, read correctly
IP diversity gets talked about as though it were a seventh tier, a stronger version of the checks above. It isn't. An IP address describes where a request entered the network, not who sent it or whether they passed through a cookie check, an account login, or a confirmed email on the way in. A contest can require none of the tiers above and still watch for repeated addresses, or require every one of them and never look at an address at all.
Treated correctly, address variety is one signal layered alongside whichever verification tier a contest actually runs, not a substitute for any of them. A wide spread of addresses behind a set of unverified clicks says something different than the same spread behind a set of confirmed-email votes, and conflating the two, treating address variety as proof on its own, misreads what each one is actually measuring. The tier tells you what was checked; the addresses tell you where the checked requests came from. Neither stands in for the other.
Most public voting contests publish rules that limit votes per account, per person or per IP address, and many prohibit automated or fraudulent voting outright. Some organisers state that votes identified as manipulative are excluded from the count without notice, and that a participant who orders paid votes for a contest can be disqualified. Read the rules before you buy votes for any poll or contest, because the organiser can remove an entry and nobody can prevent that.
Contest platforms watch for clusters: hundreds of votes from one IP address in minutes, or a spike that no real audience would produce. Many organisers also hide live totals until voting closes, which makes a sudden spike easier to spot afterwards. Votes for a contest or poll that arrive at a steady pace, from varied sources, across the whole voting window look like the rest of the traffic the platform already receives.
promosis.com brakto.com ecommercefastlane.com reddit.com producthunt.com
In the United States, legal summaries describe buying votes for a commercial online contest as not inherently illegal, while noting that bots or fake accounts can cross into deceptive-practice territory. In Australia, no specific criminal offence is described for buying contest votes, though the organiser's terms still decide. In the United Kingdom, the Advertising Standards Authority warns promoters about prize contests under the Gambling Act 2005, and in Canada the Competition Act sets disclosure duties for promotional contests. We refuse orders for any public ballot or election.
If we cannot deliver the votes you ordered for your poll or contest, the order is refunded in full. If delivery misses the deadline you set, you can claim a refund instead of the order. The guarantee never covers a result: if the organiser disqualifies your entry or excludes votes from the count, that decision is theirs and no refund or replacement changes it.
More questions
They're not really comparable, because they check different things. A confirmed email says an inbox exists and someone clicked a link inside it; a captcha says the request that arrived wasn't obviously automated. A contest can run either one alone, both together, or neither, and the two answer separate questions rather than sitting on the same scale.
No single tier stops everything on its own; it raises the cost of a low-effort attempt without eliminating a determined one. An account with real history is far harder to produce quickly than a fresh one, which is why this tier filters out casual repeat clicking more effectively than an email or a cookie check does, without making abuse impossible.
Mostly because fewer people are willing to burn through phone numbers than throwaway email addresses, so the check filters more aggressively at the cost of asking for something a visitor may be reluctant to hand over. It proves a working line existed at that moment, nothing about who was actually holding it.
It means the platform itself isn't filtering much, not that nothing filters at all. An organizer watching the raw numbers can still notice an unusual spike and act on it after the fact, even without a login, a cookie, or a confirmation step built into the entry form itself.
No. Address variety is one signal sitting alongside whatever tier a contest actually checks, not a stand-in for any of them. A spread of addresses behind unverified clicks and the same spread behind confirmed-email votes mean different things, since addresses describe where a request came from, not whether it passed any other check.
Yes, and many do: a confirmed email paired with a captcha, or an existing account paired with an address limit, are both common combinations. Each added tier raises the floor a little further, though stacking checks also raises the friction a genuine supporter has to get through just to finish voting.
Have a specific contest?
Send the link, the number you need and the deadline. We read the rules and reply with a price and a schedule.
Start a requestLast reviewed: