Live Poll

A poll you can put on screen in about twenty seconds

Somebody has to decide where lunch is. Or which of the three logos, or whether the retro moves to Thursday. The conversation goes round the table, the loudest two opinions arrive first, and half the room agrees with whoever spoke last. A poll fixes that, but only if making one takes less effort than the argument it replaces.

So this one asks for a question, two to ten choices, and nothing else. No account, no email address, no workspace to be invited to. Press Create poll and you get a short link to read out across the room and a second link that is yours alone. Everyone else opens the first one, picks an option, and watches the counts move as the rest of the room votes.

How to run one

1. Type the question the way you would say it out loud.
2. Write the choices. Two is the minimum, ten is the most a poll can hold, and any row you leave blank is simply ignored.
3. Press Create poll. Two links come back.
4. Share the first link — it is six characters, so it can be read aloud or written on a whiteboard.
5. Keep the second link. It is the manage link, and it is how you close the poll when the voting is done.
6. Watch the tally. It updates as votes land, with no refreshing.

Three things worth knowing before you start

The poll expires ninety days after the last vote. Every vote pushes that date another ninety days out, so a poll people are still using does not go anywhere — the clock runs from the last thing that happened, not from the day you made it. When ninety quiet days pass, the page stops working, and the poll and every vote in it are deleted within a day. Nothing can bring it back. Unless you signed in to keep it, there is nowhere for an old poll to live and nobody to prove it was ever yours. If the result matters to you beyond three months, copy it somewhere of your own while it is still on screen.

The manage link is the only way back in, and it cannot be recovered. It carries a secret that is never stored here — the database holds only a one-way hash of it — which means we genuinely cannot look it up, resend it, or reset it for you. Lose that link and the poll keeps running without you until it expires. Paste it somewhere you will find it again before you send the voting link to anyone.

Votes are anonymous, but they are not secret from the database. No name is attached to a vote and nobody looking at the poll can tell who picked what, including you. What is stored is the choice, the time, a random token belonging to the browser that voted, and a hash of the voter's network address used only to stop one machine flooding the count. That is enough for somebody with direct access to the database to see that two votes came from one browser. It is not enough to name anybody, and it is never shown on the page — but "anonymous" and "untraceable" are different words, and this is the first one. Do not use this for anything where being identified would hurt.

Good uses

• Lunch, the venue, the date — decisions that need to be made rather than debated.
• A show of hands in a meeting where half the room is on a video call and hands do not work.
• Checking whether a workshop agrees with the thing everyone just nodded at.
• A classroom, where a question on the board gets four answers and thirty opinions.
• Picking between designs, names or options when you want the quiet people counted too.

When to use something else

This is a poll for people who are in the same room or the same call. It is not a survey, a ballot or a form: there are no free-text answers, no ranking, no one-person-one-vote guarantee stronger than a browser token, and no export. If the result has consequences somebody might contest, use a tool built to be contested. If you want to hear what people think rather than which option they picked, that is a different shape of question, and Idea Cloud and Live Q&A are being built for it.