Poll Terms

Effective date: October 29, 2026. These Poll Terms are part of the SoapBox Republic Terms of Service (https://soapboxrepublic.com/terms). The Community Guidelines (https://soapboxrepublic.com/guidelines) set the content rules for polls. Our Privacy Policy (https://soapboxrepublic.com/privacy) explains how we handle poll data.

1. Who can take part

• You must be 18 or older, have a SoapBox Republic account, and confirm your email address before voting if we ask you to.
• One person, one account. Creating extra accounts to vote more than once is not allowed.

2. One vote per account, and votes are final

• Each account gets one vote per poll. Our database enforces this.
• Votes are final. You can't change a vote. You can withdraw all your poll answers in Settings. After that, your votes no longer count and you can't answer those polls again.
• Points, badges, and profiles never change how much your vote counts. Every vote counts once.

3. Neutrality

• Every poll asks one thing in neutral words, offers balanced choices that don't overlap, and includes "Not sure."
• SoapBox Republic does not endorse or oppose any party, candidate, or ballot measure. Polls are not campaign messages.
• Results use the same neutral colors for every choice, never red or blue party colors, and no "winner" styling.
• Community polls are labeled "Community poll · reviewed by SoapBox Republic" and use the same card style as our own polls. The feed is sorted by newest and closing soon, never by most votes or most controversial.

4. Community polls (when available)

When Community polls are not available, you can suggest a poll instead. A suggestion is reviewed, and if we choose it, SoapBox Republic publishes it under its own name.

• Who can create one: members with a confirmed email, an account at least 24 hours old, and at least 3 votes cast.
• Limits: 3 submissions a day, 5 in review and 10 live at once, single-choice questions only, 2 to 5 choices plus an automatic "Not sure," and a run of 7, 14, or 30 days.
• Topics: everyday life only at launch: cost of living, housing, groceries, gas, healthcare, childcare, schools, commutes, safety, and jobs. You pick an area: where you live, your state, or the U.S.
• Not allowed in Community polls: candidate, party, or ballot-measure horse races ("who will you vote for"); named private individuals or SoapBox Republic members; personal information; hate or harassment; violence or threats; sexual content; anything involving minors; illegal activity; health, legal, or financial advice; questions built on a false premise; and commercial promotion, fundraising, or links. The Community Guidelines add more rules, such as no push polls and no disguised campaign ads.
• Review before publishing: a person approves every Community poll before it goes public, with a target of about 24 hours. Reviewers can approve, ask for changes, reject (with a reason), or remove a live poll. We don't silently rewrite your words. Rejected polls are deleted 30 days after the rejection.
• Reports: anyone can report a poll. A live poll with 3 reports from different members is hidden until a reviewer decides.
• Your vote on your own poll counts once in the results but never toward your points.
• Your name isn't shown. See Privacy Policy Section 7.1.

5. Points for Community poll creators (when available)

• +5 when your poll is approved, +10 at 25 real voters, +10 at 100 real voters. Nothing more after that.
• A "real voter" has a confirmed email and an account at least 24 hours old, isn't you, hasn't withdrawn, and didn't fail the integrity check. One voter counts toward at most 3 of the same creator's polls in 30 days. Accounts that keep answering each other's polls are left out of each other's counts and flagged for review.
• Caps: 2 creation awards a day and 50 creation points a week.
• Points are reversed if a poll is removed for breaking the rules, or if a vote ring is confirmed. Members withdrawing their votes later never takes your points away.
• Points never depend on how people answer, the topic, or how divisive a poll is. They are private, have no cash value, and can't be spent, redeemed, or transferred (see the Terms of Service). Badges are private unless you choose to show them.

6. How results are calculated

• Results show the number and percent of votes for each choice.
• No results are shown until a poll has at least 100 votes. A poll that closes with fewer than 100 votes never shows results. Group breakdowns appear only for groups with at least 25 votes, and we show how many votes were held back. At launch, the only breakdown is by state.
• The day-by-day table hides a day's split until that day has 25 answers.
• Results are not weighted. If we ever weight them, we will say which benchmarks we used and show the raw counts too.
• Every result shows "Opinion poll — not a scientific sample," the number of votes, and an approximate spread with a warning that opt-in polls have no true margin of error.
• On Android, integrity checks are recorded but don't remove votes at launch. If we later remove votes we reasonably believe are fake or automated, we will say so on the results.
• Results are counted from current votes. If members withdraw their answers or delete their accounts, totals go down, even on closed polls.

7. Licensing of results

• SoapBox Republic may sell or license aggregated, de-identified poll results and reports, including results of Community polls. They follow the same rules as public results: at least 100 votes, at least 25 per group, no ZIP-code-level releases, and no individual answers, profiles, creator identities, or personal information.
• Licensing never changes how a question is worded, who sees it, or how votes are counted. A buyer can't write, edit, or remove a question, or see results early. There are no sponsored or paid polls.
• Buyers must agree not to re-identify anyone, and to keep the opt-in label and methods note whenever they publish results.

8. No guarantee that results represent the public

SoapBox Republic polls are opt-in opinion polls of people who chose to answer. They are not scientific samples. Results describe SoapBox Republic members who voted, not Americans or any other population. Do not treat them as predictions of an election or as official results.

9. Election-style polls

• Only SoapBox Republic writes election-style polls (candidates or ballot measures). They are unofficial opinion polls. They are not voting, do not count in any election, and are not connected to any election office.
• To vote in a real election, use your official state or county election office. SoapBox Republic does not register voters, collect voter registration information, or reward anyone for registering or voting.
• Election Day quiet period. On each federal Election Day, from 12:00 AM through 8:00 PM local time, we don't publish new election-related Community polls or new results for candidate polls. Because our results are national, we start the quiet period at 12:00 AM Eastern Time and end it at 8:00 PM Pacific Time. Results published before the quiet period stay visible, labeled as opinion polls.

10. Misuse

You may not:

• vote more than once, use fake or shared accounts, or buy, sell, or trade accounts, votes, or points;
• use bots, scripts, emulators, or modified apps to vote or create polls, or flood polls in a coordinated way ("brigading");
• organize vote rings or other schemes to earn points;
• scrape poll data, resell SoapBox Republic results without a license, or try to work out how any person voted or who created a poll;
• pay or pressure others to vote a certain way;
• present results as scientific, representative, or official, or crop out the opt-in label;
• imply that SoapBox Republic endorses a candidate, party, or position.

If we reasonably believe you broke these rules, we may remove votes, polls, or points, limit what you can do, or suspend or close your account, as the Terms of Service describe.

11. Sharing results

You may share published results if you keep the number of votes, the dates, and the label "Opinion poll — not a scientific sample," and link back to the poll.

12. Changes and contact

We may update these Poll Terms. Material changes will be dated and announced in the app. Questions: support@soapboxrepublic.com.