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How to restrict Contest Voting to specific Countries
How to restrict Contest Voting to specific Countries
Andrew Busuttil avatar
Written by Andrew Busuttil
Updated over a week ago

What is Geo-blocking?

Geo-blocking is mechanism that restricts access to contest voting based upon the voter's geographical location. LaunchPad6's geo-blocking scheme allows contest administrators to specify the countries from which votes will be accepted and define rules to accept or reject vote received from proxies or VPNs.

Defining Geo-blocking Rules

Before you can add Geo-blocking to your contest, we need to define some rules. The Launchpad6 Geo-Blocking rules provides you with flexibility and convenience. Rules are defined at a site level, and you can assign specific rules to an individual contest or assign rules across multiple contests.

To define a rule:

  1. Login into the Admin console for your contest:

    https://<site-name>.us.launchpad6.com/admin

  2. Press the Settings button, which is in the top right of the navigation bar.

  3. Scroll down until you see the heading EMAIL/DOMAIN/IP BANNED LIST.

  4. Press the Open Blocking Manager button. The Blocker settings screen will appear.

  5. Click on the Location Blocking tab, as shown below:

    Graphical user interface, application

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6. Press the Add Geo Rule button. A new screen will appear:


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7. Add a rule name in the Rule Name field. This field is just a text descriptor to identify the rule when apply it in contests. You can use anything, but we recommend using something that describes the behavior of the rule – some examples would be US_ONLY_NO_VPN, US_CAN_NO_PROXIES.

8. VPNs and Proxies can be used to circumvent Geo-Blocking or Voting limits based on an IP address. Select a VPN Blocking policy to specific how strict you want your Geo-blocking to be.

9. The options, ordered from most permissive to most strict, are:

Option

Description

None

Allows all IP address – allows the greater chance of fraudulent voting.

Block Proxies

Denies requests from IP addresses known to be:

  • Public proxies

  • TOR exit nodes

  • Web Proxies

Block VPNs Only

Deny requests from IP addresses known to be:

  • Anonymizing VPN Services

Block Proxies and VPNs

Denies requests from IP addresses known to be:

  • Public proxies

  • TOR exit nodes

  • Web Proxies

  • Anonymizing VPN Services

10. Finally, using the list, Select Countries that can participate. You can select ALL, a single country, or multiple countries.

11. Press the Add button to save. The rule will now appear the Location Blocking table.

You can create as many rules as you like, and rules can be edited using the Manage button or removed using the Delete.

Rules are not active until they are assigned to a contest.

Apply Geo-Blocking Rules to Voting

To assign a Geo-Blocking rule:

  1. Login into the Admin console for your contest:

    https://<site-name>.us.launchpad6.com/admin

  2. Press the Contest button, which is in the left navigation bar. The button is shown below:

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    Click the Manage button for the contest you want to apply the Geo-Blocking.

  3. Click the Settings tab.

  4. Click Voting & Judging from the left sub-navigation panel:

    Graphical user interface, text, application, email

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    The list of Voting Periods and Judging Rounds will appear.

  5. Click the Manage button for the Voting Period that you want to apply Geo-Blocking to. The Manage Voting screen will appear.

  6. Scroll down to the field Which countries can votes come from?

  7. Click the field, a list of available rules will appear. If no rules appear – you need to create one, the instructions are in the section above!

  8. Select the rule(s) to apply to Voting. Note: If you apply multiple rules, the voter IP address must satisfy all conditions (it’s logical AND condition, not OR). This means if one rule limits voters to Australia and another rule limits voters to New Zealand, no one will be able to vote – as an IP address cannot be located in Australia and New Zealand! We suggest only assigning single rule.

  9. Save the Voting Period with Geo-blocking rule by pressing the Update button.

Vote Quarantining

What happens with someone from an excluded country or is using a VPN casts a vote?

Determining the country, proxy or VPN status of an IP address is not an exact science – and can inadvertently disqualify a vote which should be counted. To ensure that these errors can be corrected, the Launchpad6 platform captures all votes – even those votes which have failed the Geo-block rules.

These votes do not count towards the vote totals, instead they are placed in Quarantine.

To see which votes have been placed into quarantine:

  1. Login into the Admin console for your contest:

    https://<site-name>.us.launchpad6.com/admin

  2. Press the Contest button, which is in the left navigation bar. The button is shown below:

    A picture containing text

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  3. Click the Manage button for the contest which has quarantined votes.

  4. Click the Votes tab.

  5. Click the Quarantined Votes tab from the sub-menu. The following screen will be displayed:

    Graphical user interface, application

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6. The Vote Quarantined screen displays all the votes that have failed to satisfy the Geo-blocking rule(s). Each vote record will display the details of the cast vote as well as identify the reason it was quarantined.

Releasing Votes from Quarantine

Any vote placed into Quarantine can be released. When a vote is released, the system will place the into a processing queue to complete the necessary vote validation, including email address validation before the vote is included in the Vote tally.

To release votes from quarantine using the user interface:

  1. Login into the Admin console for your contest:

    https://<site-name>.us.launchpad6.com/admin

  2. Press the Contest button, which is in the left navigation bar. The button is shown below:

    A picture containing text

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  3. Click the Manage button for the contest which has quarantined votes.

  4. Click the Votes tab.

  5. Click the Quarantined Votes tab from the sub-menu.

Select the vote(s) to be removed from quarantine by clicking the checkbox on the associated row.

Tip: Using the controls for: Displayed records, Search box and Select All checkbox will allow you to find, select and release multiple documents quickly.

6. With the votes selected, press the Tools button. A sub-menu will appear.

7. Click the option Release selected. The selected vote(s) will be released from quarantine and progress to vote validation.

In the case where the number of votes to be released is large (hundreds or thousands) using the user interface may not be the most efficient method. In this situation, we recommend using a file list to identify the votes to release from quarantine.

This can be done by completing the following steps:

  1. Login into the Admin console for your contest:

    https://<site-name>.us.launchpad6.com/admin

  2. Press the Contest button, which is in the left navigation bar. The button is shown below:

    A picture containing text

Description automatically generated

  3. Click the Manage button for the contest which has quarantined votes.

  4. Click the Votes tab.

  5. Click the Quarantined Votes tab from the sub-menu.

  6. The easiest way to generate the list is to press Export to CSV button and select the option Export Quarantined. This will download a CSV file that contains a list all quarantined votes.

  7. Edit the CSV file using Excel or a text editor. Remove any row that will not be released from Quarantine and save the file.

  8. Return to the Quarantined Votes screen.

  9. Press the Tools button and select the option Release using file list from the sub-menu that appears.

  10. Press the Select button.

  11. Select the CSV file from the file system dialog window and press the Open button. The file will be uploaded to the server.

Press the Import button. The vote(s) contained in the CSV file will be released from quarantine and progress to vote validation.

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