Protecting consultation integrity: how we prevent spam and fake responses

Public consultations attract strong opinions, and may also receive duplicate, organised campaign or automated submissions. ConsultOnline provides controls and records that can help teams identify unusual activity. These controls reduce risk but do not establish identity, representativeness or the truth of a response.

This is a problem we took seriously from the start of ConsultOnline 2.0's design.

The challenge of open consultations

There is a tension in consultation design between openness and integrity. You want as many people as possible to participate — low barriers mean more responses. But low barriers also mean it is easier for someone to submit multiple responses, for a bot to flood a survey or for people outside the consultation area to influence the results.