### Documentation

# Voting frequency

TotalPoll comes with very powerful multi-layered techniques to make sure your poll receive credible votes only. You may want to receive a single vote per user, voting frequency settings will help you setup how often your users can vote on your poll.

Voting frequency settings

## Voting frequency#

There are few ways to identify users and recognize if they have voted or not.

### 1. Cookies#

Cookies are piece of data that is stored into the user browser, once he vote, TotalPoll will store a cookie into the voter browser to be recognized next time he tries to vote.

Please note that cookies method is a weak way to rely on because the voter can remove them easily. If multi-voting matters, we highly recommend enabling other voting frequency options.

### 2. IP#

Every user has an IP address, TotalPoll makes use of this to identify if the user with a specific IP address have voted before or not.

Although IP limitation is much more powerful than cookies, it might still not a 100% guarntee as it is possible for voters to change their IP by using a VPN, but it is highly recommended to keep it active

### 3. Authenticated user#

If the user is logged in and votes, he will not be able to re-vote as TotalPoll can easily recognize him. So far, this method can be the most powerful method to have credible votes.

### 4. Votes per user#

You may specify how many times the user can vote based on each of the 3 methods mentioned above.

### 5. Vote timeout#

If you want users to be able to vote again after a period of time, you may set the timeout to the number of seconds you want. If you don't want to have any timeout and keep the user blocked from voting, you can set it to `0`.

Example: If Votes per user is `3` and timeout is `3600`, each user will be able to vote 3 times every hour
It is highly recommended to have a timeout, even if it is quite high number like `2628000` (month in seconds). This is because TotalPoll will sometimes store who voted into the database and using a timeout will be very helpful to purge that from your database after a while.