Issue polls

What an Issue Poll measures

An Issue Poll counts answers from the people who actually opened your link — nobody else. It doesn't sample your district, it doesn't weight anyone's answer, and it never states a confidence range around a number. What you get back is a plain count of how the people on your own list answered, and nothing beyond that.

That's a real, useful thing — knowing what the people already paying attention to your campaign think about a question — and it's a different thing from a poll of everyone in your race. An Issue Poll never claims to be the second kind, in its results or anywhere else.

What you can ask

A poll holds up to five questions, each either:

• Yes/no — two buttons, one tap.
• 1–5 scale — five buttons, with your own words at the low and high ends if you want them (for example, "Strongly against" to "Strongly for").

There's no free-text question and no multiple choice yet — see "What this is not" below.

Launch, then publish

Launching a poll is what lets it start accepting answers, and it's a separate step from publishing your site — launching marks your site changes pending republish, the same status most other edits create. The four links described below don't go live until you publish. If you've already written and reviewed your questions, launch and publish together and there's no gap where the links are dead.

Your four links

Every poll gets four links, one per channel, so you can tell which one people actually used:

Link	Where you'd use it
Direct	Anywhere you'd paste a plain link — your own notes, a message you type by hand
Email	The email blast you send through your own email tool
SMS	The text blast you send through your own texting tool
QR	Printed literature, yard signs, tabling — anything scanned

You copy these links into the tools you already use. Electbase doesn't send the email or the text message itself — it never has, for any feature on the platform.

Each link sits on your own domain once you've connected one. If you haven't connected a domain yet, the links use your <slug>.electbase.com address instead — the same address the rest of your site is on today, and not something a poll can change on its own; connect a domain from the Domain card if you'd rather it read your own name.

QR code

Next to the QR link are the same PNG and SVG download buttons you already use for your site's other QR codes. Pull whichever file your print shop wants and drop it onto a yard sign, a mailer, or a lit piece. Scanning it opens the poll on the QR link, exactly like tapping a link typed by hand.

Anonymous by design

An Issue Poll never asks who's answering, and there's nowhere in it for that to sneak in later. Answers are stored only as daily totals for each question and answer — never as individual responses, never with a time finer than the calendar day, and no name, email address, phone number, or device identifier is stored with an answer. Only the count for each answer goes up.

Electbase's load balancer keeps a standard request log for requests to our API — IP address, browser type, the page that sent the request, time, and the request URL — for 30 days for security. That log covers things like submitting an answer or checking a poll's status, not the poll page itself, and it never contains answers and the application never joins it to the tallies. The IP is never written to the database, and it never reaches your results.

To keep one person from accidentally answering the same poll twice in a sitting, your browser remembers on its own that a visitor has already answered. That's a courtesy, not a lock: clearing site data, or opening the poll in a different browser, lets someone answer again. That memory works only when your cookie preferences allow functional storage; if you decline functional cookies, the soft reminder simply doesn't happen. That's by design — there is nothing about a person recorded to check against in the first place.

If you turn on the donate ask, clicking the donate button is recorded as a timestamped event, like every other donate click on your site, with the same consent rules (your analytics choice gates it), and no answer is attached to that event.

Showing results to respondents

By default, nobody who answers your poll sees how anyone else answered — they get a thank-you, or your donate ask if you've turned that on. You can turn on Show results per poll if you'd rather respondents see the tally right after they finish. When you turn it on, the running totals become public to anyone who has the link. Once a question is above the floor, anyone with the link can read the running totals as each new answer arrives, which is why the option is off by default.

Even with results on, a percentage only appears once a question has racked up 20 responses. Below that, whoever's looking sees only how many people have answered so far and this line: "Too few responses so far to show a breakdown." A handful of answers should not be dressed up as a number that means more than it does.

Reading your results

Your poll's results page always shows a count next to whatever number it's built from — how many times each link was opened, how many answered each question, how many clicked through to donate — so you're never looking at a rate with nothing behind it. Two floors keep a thin number from looking sturdier than it is:

• A per-question rate stays hidden until that question has 20 responses.
• The poll's overall completion rate stays hidden until it's had 100 opens and 20 completions.

Below either floor, you get the raw count and a note that there isn't enough yet to show a rate.

Your results page is windowed to help you see what's happening right now: you can switch the view to the last 7 days, 30 days, or 90 days — the default is 30. Two headings on the page name the window they cover, and every ladder step repeats it in its own label; every other count under a heading — opens and their channel split, the completion rate and the numbers behind it, each question's answer count, its per-answer counts, and its by-channel lines — shares that heading's window. The poll list one click away, and the dashboard card, both show your all-time completion counts; what respondents see after they finish is your all-time total too. So the same poll might show 150 all-time completions on the list but 45 on your results page set to 30 days — that's just different windows on the same poll.

Opens, answers, and completions are also split by channel — direct, email, SMS, and QR — so you can see which link people actually used. Your own results page shows the raw count for every answer at any number of responses — with only a handful of responses that count can identify how one person answered. Only the percentage waits for 20 responses before showing. A channel sent to very few people can tell you how they answered the same way; treat small counts as potentially identifying and don't share them. A card on your dashboard lists your live polls with their completed-answer counts; open one for the full breakdown.

Asking for a donation

Turning on the donate ask adds a closing screen after the last question, with a button to your campaign's own donate link — the same processor and the same link you've already set up on the rest of your site. Electbase never touches, holds, or sees the money; the button just hands your visitor off to your processor, exactly like every other donate button on your site.

When it hands off, Electbase appends a tag to the link so the click can be told apart from your other traffic — a refcode if your donate link is on ActBlue, standard UTM parameters otherwise — unless your link already carries one of its own (a campaign-owned refcode or matching UTM parameters are never overwritten). Make sure the processor you selected in the Campaign panel matches where your donate link actually goes, because that's what your click reporting is labelled with. If your donate link has no usable processor attached, the button doesn't appear; respondents get the thank-you screen instead. That's all it does: append the tag and let your processor's own reporting take it from there.

If you'd rather not close on a donate ask, leave it off — respondents get a plain thank-you instead.

Closing a poll

Closing a poll stops it from taking new answers, usually within about fifteen seconds, without needing you to publish your site again the way launching does. The link itself keeps working — anyone who opens it afterward sees a plain "This poll has closed" instead of the questions, rather than a dead link. Everything you already collected stays exactly where it was and stays readable to you, indefinitely. A closed poll can't reopen; clone it if you want to run something like it again.

Plans

Issue polls are included on Rally and up. If your account moves below Rally — a downgrade, a lapsed payment that doesn't get fixed — any live poll stops taking new answers right away, the same door-check every Rally feature runs. Nothing you already collected is lost: your results stay readable, and a poll picks back up taking answers the moment you're back on Rally or above.

What this is not

An Issue Poll is not an attack on an opponent dressed up as questions, and it is not research: it measures the people who received your link, nothing more. It's your own page, on your own site or domain, carrying your own disclaimer, sent to people already on your own list — it never pretends to be neutral outside research, and it never speaks for anyone beyond the people who actually answered it.

A few other limits, on purpose:

• Up to five questions, yes/no or 1–5 scale only — nothing open-ended.
• No free-text answer type.
• No multiple choice yet.