Euthyna cannot tell how you voted

When you vote

Nothing records that it was you

A vote is stored as five things: which issue, which wording of the question, which electorate, what you chose, and the day.

There is no column for who cast it. No account reference, no hidden identifier, and no link back to your name — because no such column exists to write one into.

The day, not the time. A precise moment could be lined up against other records to work out who voted; a date cannot.

Voting once

You can only vote once, and nobody learns who you are

When you vote, Euthyna works out a one-way code from your identity and that issue. It keeps the code, not you. If the same code arrives again, the second vote is refused.

The code cannot be turned back into a person. The same person voting on a different issue produces a completely unrelated code, so codes cannot be gathered up to build a picture of one voter across the site.

When an issue closes

The link is destroyed, not just protected

Every issue has its own secret value, and closing the issue destroys it. After that the codes for that issue cannot be worked out again by anyone — not by Euthyna, not by whoever runs it in ten years, and not by a court.

This costs you something, and you should know what. Once an issue is closed, Euthyna can no longer tell you whether you voted on it. The ability to answer that question is exactly the link that was destroyed. Euthyna would rather lose the feature than keep the link — and it did: a page listing the issues you had voted on was built, and removed the same day, for this reason.

Proving you are real

Your name and address exist in one place, briefly

Euthyna confirms you are a real person entitled to vote here, once. Doing that needs your name and address — an envelope cannot be addressed without them. They are held in a single place, for as long as the check takes, and then deleted.

• If you finish, they are deleted in the same moment your anonymous record is created. Not overnight, not on a schedule.
• If you start and never finish, they are deleted when the attempt expires. Abandoning it does not leave them behind.

If you prove who you are with an identity document, Euthyna never receives the photograph of it. It receives the document number and the address printed on it. The number becomes part of your one-way code and is never written down; the address is used to work out your electorates and is destroyed with the rest.

What survives is a one-way code and the electorates you were placed in. Your address is never stored beside them.

Your browser

Three cookies, and none of them describes you

• One shows this browser belongs to somebody who has been confirmed — without saying who.
• One signs you in, and only exists if you have been invited to help run Euthyna. Most readers never get one.
• One keeps a private link working while the site is not yet open.

There is no analytics on this site, no advertising, and no third-party script of any kind. Nothing follows you here from somewhere else, and nothing follows you away.

If you write a comment

A person reads it first, looking for you in it

You can add a short reason to a vote. It is read before it could ever appear anywhere, and it is checked for anything that identifies you as well as for abuse.

“As the only butcher left on the high street…” names its author without leaking anything. That is the kind of sentence the check is for.