The Brighter Planet Blog

With more than 4,600 members of the Brighter Planet community taking action to vote on Project Fund proposals earlier this month, our grassroots stimulus package finally became a reality. We had a total of 13,983 votes from all 50 states supporting projects that focused on renewables, environmental education, energy efficiency and more.

Before voting began, we integrated a “fraud detection” system to ensure that each vote was coming from a real person, and that each person only had a single account with Brighter Planet. After scouring through every single vote that came into our system for validity, we discovered a few cases of fraud from overzealous supporters and were forced to delete a handful of votes.

To safeguard from this happening again, we added a CAPTCHA system (those funny words websites make you type in) to prevent automated user sign-ups, and require email verification for our users before they can vote. With these improvements in place, we hope to stop the voting fraud before it happens.

Voting begins again on November 1^st and thirteen projects have already been vetted and are on deck. Be sure to visit the Project Fund homepage to check them out and vote on the ones you like!

-Matt V