How to accept unique submissions for your form?

Hello Support,

Please advise if it is possible to send a unique link per parent/guardian or to get a unique vote per parent for voting for the school board at the AGM.

Regards

Greg

Hi gregsmith198,

Thanks for reaching out to Jotform Support. Yes, you can allow one submission per person. All you need to do is enable the Unique field. Let me show you how:

1. On your My Forms page, hover your mouse over your form and click on Edit Form on the right side of the screen.
2. In Form Builder, in the orange navigation bar at the top of the page, click on Settings and then click on Show More Options.
3. Under Unique Submission option, select your preferred option from the dropdown.
4. You may also select the field that you want to be the basis of the uniqueness of the submission. Most of the time, the email address is selected in this part.

That's it! The form builder automatically saves the changes.

You can also check our guide about How to Set Unique Submissions on a Form.

Give it a try and let us know how it goes.

Thanks Lara, please advise how we can audit that the families only get the number of unique votes allocated to them without really knowing their votes

basically without capturing ay identifiable user information how do we know that family A with 4 votes only voted 4 times and family B with 2 votes only voted 2 times. Perhaps I want a randomized code that gets emailed or sms'd to them that doesn't record the delivery of that code.

Hi Greg,

Let me look into it and get back to you with a solution.

Thanks for your patience, we appreciate it.

Hi Haseeb,

please advise as a matter of urgency as we need to send out a communication to the stakeholders today before 12:00. Ideally we would like an individualized, unanimous link per email address to the voting form.

Kind Regards

Greg

Hi gregsmith198,

All you need to do is not sharing the form URL with your form responders, instead, you can invite them by email to avoid any issues. Let me show you how:

1. In Form. Builder, at the top of the page in the orange navigation bar, click on Settings.

2. Click on Invite By Email and type in the Emails you'd like to send an invitation to.

3. Toggle Submit & View Later to Submit Only.

4. Finally, click on Send Invitation. That's it.

Give it a try and let us know how it goes.

Thank you Kobe,

Why do the recipients have to create a Jotform account to complete the form? How do I restrict submissions to one per invitation?

Regards

Greg

Hi Greg,

Assigning a user to a form requires them to have a Jotform account. This is to ensure that only the assigned user can access the form. You can enable Unique Submission as instructed by Lara above. This will prevent multiple submissions from the same device and IP address.

Now, coming back to your other concern, you wanted to be able to track how many times a family voted. I'm lost on this since you mentioned you only want to allow one submission. Do you mean a family member with 4 members and each of them can vote one time? If so, it wouldn't be possible if you enable Unique Submission and select strict check (Cookies and IP). Most likely, the family members live in the same household and they have the same IP address. If you only select cookies, it's possible that can you get more votes from the family specifically if they have multiple devices and if they use different browsers.

If that’s not exactly what you’re looking for, can you explain a bit more so I can help you better?

Yes this is the exact problem, we don't want to be able to know who voted but be assured that only one vote was done per person

Hi Greg,

Setting up a Unique Submission should help, but as I have discussed, if the voters share the same IP address, this prevents the other from completing the form.

Reach out again if you need any other help.

I have tried making the form Private and sending the form to an email address, however if the person receiving the email uses a different email address to the one i sent the form to they are able to access and submit the form which is no good.

Hi Greg,

If you set the form as Private only the user whom you sent the form can access it. That's why when you assign the form, they will be required to create a Jotform account with the same email so they are the only person who can access it. Can you explain in detail what is your goal on your voting form so we can provide better options or workaround?

Once we hear back from you, we'll be able to help you with this.

Ideally  I am looking for an online voting system, where the vote is secret and unique but limited to a bank of email addresses, unique links limited to once off usage would be the best option but I cannot find a way to do this.

Hi Greg,

I understand your concern, but I’ll need a bit of time to work out a solution. I’ll get back to you shortly.

Thanks for your patience, we appreciate it.

Hi Greg,

I have a workaround to offer. Since you have a list of email addresses, we can add an email field and hide it on the form. We will prefill the email field through manual prefill and then set this field and Unique Field. We will provide the voter with a prefill link, and they can only vote once since it has a prefill of their email address. If the system detects another attempt at submission with the same email address, it won't be accepted. Let me show you how.

First, add an email field and hide it on the form:

1. In Form Builder, once you added the email field, click on it and click on the gear icon on the right side.
2. On the right panel, click on Advanced.
3. Turn on Hide field.

Next, set the email field as Unique Field:

1. In Form Builder, in the orange navigation bar at the top of the screen, click on Settings.
2. Click on Form Settings on the left side of the screen.
3. Click on the blue Show More Options button below.
4. On Unique Field, select email.
   

Finally, create the prefill:

1. In Form Builder, in the orange navigation bar at the top of the screen, click on Publish.
2. Click on Prefill on the left side of the screen.
3. On prefill options, select Manual Prefill.
4. In the middle of the screen, click on Add a New Prefill.
5. Prefill the email field with the voter's email address.
6. Click on the green Create button on the top right.
7. Once the prefill link is created, click on it and click on the 3 dots on the right side.
8. Below that, click on Copy URL and send it to the same email address for that specific prefill.

You can test this sample prefill link. If you fill out it out again, it won't be submitted. We also have this guide about Jotform Prefill that you can check out.

Give it a try and let us know if you need any help.