Protecting consultation integrity: how we prevent spam and fake responses

Public consultations attract strong opinions. That is the point. But they can also attract organised campaigns, duplicate submissions, and automated spam — all of which undermine the credibility of the results. When a developer submits a Statement of Community Involvement to a planning authority, they need confidence that the data represents genuine community sentiment, not a coordinated effort to skew the numbers.

This is a problem we took seriously from the start of ConsultOnline 2.0's design.

The challenge of open consultations

There is a tension in consultation design between openness and integrity. You want as many people as possible to participate — low barriers mean more responses. But low barriers also mean it is easier for someone to submit multiple responses, for a bot to flood a survey, or for people outside the consultation area to influence the results.