For 90 years, the people who decided college football did it behind closed doors — and asked you to trust them anyway. We're going the opposite direction: open ballots, visible accountability, and the simplest, least invasive integrity layer that actually works.
A fan-voted poll only means something if the votes are real.
We could have built this without guardrails and hoped nobody noticed. That's what gets you a novelty. We're not building a novelty. The Poll has to stand next to the AP, the Coaches, and the CFP Committee as a serious voice — which means every ballot has to count, and no ballot can count twice.
The challenge: do that without demanding things from fans that fans shouldn't have to hand over to cast a vote. No government IDs. No selfies. No phone tree. No surveillance stack dressed up as security.
The difference matters. And it's what lets us keep the integrity layer simple, fast, and respectful — while still closing the door on mass multi-accounting.
No single check is perfect. So we stack several lightweight ones — each respectful on its own, serious when combined.
To cast a ballot, you become a member. That's our strongest integrity layer by a wide margin: the economics of running a farm of duplicate accounts collapse the second each one has to pay. Payment fraud gets screened by Stripe Radar before it ever touches a ballot.
Verified email is required. Sign up with a real inbox — or a Google, Apple, or X account — and you start with a reputation carried from a service that already knows you. Disposable-email domains are blocked at signup.
Cloudflare Turnstile runs invisibly on signup and ballot submission — no CAPTCHA puzzles, no image-matching. Device fingerprinting flags the same browser signing up as ten different people. Rate limits stop scripted vote-stuffing before it scales.
Every ballot is public, permanent, and tied to a profile. That's not a design choice — it's integrity. A fake account has to stand next to real ones all season. Flakes get noticed. Stuffers get exposed. The Poll self-corrects in daylight.
A committee behind closed doors can tell you a ranking came from somewhere serious and you just have to take their word for it. We can't do that. We have to show you.
So every ballot on The People's Poll is public from the first week. Your name — or your chosen handle — is attached. Your accuracy over time becomes part of your profile. Your reach compounds with being right.
This is the inverse of the system it replaces. The writers vote in private and never have to defend a ranking. Our members vote in public and defend every one.
Every "integrity" feature we ruled out is a line we're not willing to cross to get a vote.
We'll never ask you to upload a driver's license or passport to cast a vote on a sports ranking. That's not a bar — that's a border.
No liveness checks. No facial recognition. No AI-reviewed face scans. The point is to prove you're one person, not to let us see your face.
SMS verification gets abused both ways — spammers use burner numbers; fans don't want to hand over their main line. Optional, never required.
No ad network pays us to profile you. Members pay the bills. Your email is for product updates you opted into — not a resale pipeline.
We won't hide how the Poll is tallied behind "proprietary weighting." One member, one ballot, plain math — published.
Every quarter — in public, on this site — we publish the numbers behind how the Poll stays clean. Not because we have to. Because we said we would.
If the AP Poll did this, we might not have needed to build The People's Poll. They don't. We will.
You don't have to take our word that the Poll is real. You'll be able to read the audit.
Get on the list. The earliest names on it get the first ballot when the season opens.