Building VoteBD: A Social Experiment in Anonymous Election Prediction
How we're using device fingerprinting and crowd wisdom to create a historical record of Bangladesh's collective political sentiment—without collecting a single name.
We built VoteBD with a singular motivation: to capture the raw, unfiltered voice of the nation in a way that history books often miss.
In an era of noise and polarized narratives, the truth often gets lost. Traditional polling is slow, biased, and often disconnected from the pulse of the streets. We wanted to create something different—a living, breathing record of public sentiment that evolves in real-time.
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
— Oscar Wilde
This platform is not just about predicting an election. It's an experiment in decentralized wisdom. A place where every voice counts equally. Where your identity doesn't matter—only your insight does.
The Problem with Traditional Polls
Traditional election polling has inherent flaws. People lie. Social desirability bias skews responses. Sample sizes are small. Results take days or weeks to compile. And by the time they're published, sentiment has already shifted.
Worse, in politically charged environments, people fear expressing their true opinions. They worry about judgment from pollsters, neighbors, or anyone who might be listening. The result? Polls that miss the mark entirely.
We asked ourselves: What if we could remove that fear entirely?
Our Approach: Device Fingerprinting
Instead of requiring user accounts—which demand emails, passwords, and personal information—we use a technique called device fingerprinting.
When you visit VoteBD, we collect characteristics of your device: screen resolution, timezone, browser type, hardware capabilities, and other non-identifying markers. These are combined and hashed using SHA-256 to create a unique 64-character fingerprint.
// Device characteristics → SHA-256 hash
userAgent + screenResolution + timezone +
hardwareConcurrency + canvasFingerprint +
webglFingerprint + fonts + touchSupport
// Result:
"32ad0164e69febc588d8cbb12e51347d89d2e9c7..."This fingerprint is irreversible. We cannot identify you from it. We don't know your name, your location, or anything personal about you. All we know is: "this device has already voted in this constituency."
The result? One device = one vote. No accounts. No tracking. No way to stuff the ballot box without physically acquiring hundreds of different devices.
Why Anonymity Matters
When people know they're being watched—or even might be identified—they self-censor. They give the "acceptable" answer rather than the honest one.
VoteBD strips away that pressure. You can vote for whoever you genuinely believe will win, not whoever you want to be seen supporting. There's no social cost, no risk of backlash, no record that could ever be tied to you.
- •True anonymity — No email, phone, or personal data collected
- •Zero friction — Vote instantly without signup barriers
- •Honest responses — Anonymity encourages authentic opinions
- •Sybil-resistant — Creating fake votes requires physical devices
The Social Experiment
Here's our hypothesis: Can an anonymous crowd-sourced prediction platform accurately reflect—or even predict—the outcome of a national election?
There's a concept in social science called the "wisdom of crowds". When you aggregate independent predictions from a large group of people, the collective answer often outperforms individual experts. The errors cancel out; the signal emerges from the noise.
VoteBD is testing this theory in the wild. We're collecting predictions for all 300 constituencies in Bangladesh, plus broader questions about national outcomes, voter turnout, and regional patterns through our prediction forecasts.
After the 2026 Election
We'll publish a comprehensive analysis comparing VoteBD predictions against actual results:
- → Constituency-by-constituency accuracy comparison
- → How we performed vs. traditional polls
- → Geographic patterns: Where was the crowd most accurate?
- → Temporal analysis: How did predictions shift over time?
Win or lose, this data becomes a historical artifact. A snapshot of what millions of people believed in the months leading up to one of the most consequential elections in Bangladesh's history.
Live Analytics
Everything we collect is displayed transparently. We show total votes, unique visitors, and even geographic distribution of participants (via IP geolocation—which tells us the city, not who you are).
You can watch the data evolve in real-time on our Live Analytics dashboard. See where votes are coming from. Track how predictions shift. Witness the collective mind of the nation forming its opinion.
A Testament of Time
Every vote cast here is a timestamp. Every prediction is a snapshot of collective consciousness at a specific moment. When future generations look back, they won't see manipulated narratives or filtered opinions—they'll see the unvarnished truth of what the people believed.
We're building this as a digital archive. A historical document in the making. A testament to the power of anonymous, collective intelligence.
When you give people the freedom to speak without fear, you get something closer to truth than any poll or pundit could ever provide.