Super awesome voting software for contests?

March 16, 2011 10:54 AM

What's new and different since my last question on voting software for contests?

Last year I asked that previous question about voting software for a contest similar to the Best of Xcity that a lot of alt weeklies run. While there's any number of packages, I'm still looking for something that has this awesome feature:

* BIG BIG feature: * Since many of the questions will involve write ins, where people type in a answer, it would GREAT if there was some way of tabulating, on the back end, those write in votes when they're the same thing but obviously misspelled. For instance, if the question is "Who's the sexist person in town?" and there are various answers like "Brad Peters" or "B Peters" or "brad peters" it would be great to mark those and similar answers as the "same" and have them count as votes for one person instead of three different people.

I'm open to some other way of handling this, but the key issue is dealing with people's misspelled votes and being able to easily tabulate them at the end of the contest with as minimal effort as possible. Anything to avoid the drudgery of counting by hand.

So does anyone know of software with this feature or some other means of easily tabulating many misspelled votes? How about software that presents a popup menu of previously entered votes so a person can choose from that list?

posted by Brandon Blatcher to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Google Refine isn't polling software, but it seems purpose built for doing what you're talking about with data that you acquire from some other source.
posted by stuart_s at 11:40 AM on March 16, 2011

stuart_s, that link is GOLD. You just saved us a helluva lot time, thanks!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:13 AM on April 6, 2011