Google Submits Patent Application For Online Voting (thestack.com)

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 18, 2016 @05:44AM from the needs-a-none-of-the-above-option dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Google has outlined a concept for real-time online voting in the Google home page in a patent to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Entitled 'Social Voting-Based Campaigns in Search', the application proposes a voting user interface (VUI) that will enable a user to submit one or more votes in a voting-based campaign, giving the hypothetical example of a campaign to vote for the 'Top American Singer', with users authenticated via Google log-ins. If implemented, the system would represent a new foray for Google into generating rather than recording analytics and metrics of popularity.

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Re:How about no? by Sowelu · 2016-02-18 06:44 · Score: 3, Informative

You realize this has nothing to do with electoral voting, right? The headline is a little vague.
Re:One or more votes? by taustin · 2016-02-18 07:47 · Score: 3, Informative

This is for opinion polls, not actual elections. And some stuff allows more than one vote. America's Got Talent, for instance, allows up to 10 votes per method (online - using your Google signon, I believe - text and 800 call) in the audience vote rounds.
Since getting extra votes on Google accounts is as simple as installing multiple browsers, or just going in to private browsing mode, it's so obviously unsuitable for anything that matters that even the government can figure it out.