Methodology & Trust
Midwest Metrics is built around aggregate civic intelligence: collecting community responses, limiting duplicate voting, flagging suspicious patterns, and publishing results with clear context. Public reports are designed to show group-level trends, not individual-level respondent records.
Midwest Metrics measures responses to local civic questions. The goal is to identify directional community signals such as priorities, concerns, preferences, and issue trends. These polls should be read as civic feedback signals, not as election-grade polling or a replacement for scientific random-sample survey research.
Anonymous voters are tracked with an anonymous browser-level voter ID so the platform can limit repeat voting without requiring an account. Network and device metadata may be used for fraud, rate-limit, and audit signals.
Verified participation is designed to separate account-based responses from anonymous responses. Reports may show verified and anonymous totals separately so readers can understand the makeup of the response pool.
Public results are aggregate summaries. Midwest Metrics does not publish individual vote records, raw IP addresses, device identifiers, or respondent identity data in public result pages. The public archive focuses on option percentages, accepted vote totals, verified/anonymous splits, suspicious vote counts, and quality labels.
No accepted responses have been recorded yet.
Results exist, but the sample is too small to treat as strong evidence.
Results can be interpreted with methodology and limitation notes.
Some integrity or quality signals suggest extra review before relying on the result.
The poll has elevated warning signals and should not be over-interpreted.
The platform uses duplicate-vote limits, anonymous voter IDs, verified-account separation, fraud scoring, suspicious activity flags, and quality labels to make results more reliable. These controls improve trust, but no open web poll should be treated as perfect. Results should be interpreted with sample size, timing, sponsorship, and participation context.
Sponsored polls should be clearly disclosed. The intended default product is aggregate reporting: poll totals, percentages, verified/anonymous splits, quality notes, and written summaries. Any partner-specific sharing beyond aggregate results should be explicit, separate, and opt-in.
Midwest Metrics is designed to be a permissioned, aggregate-first civic intelligence platform. The goal is to help local decision-makers understand public sentiment while avoiding individual-level public exposure and avoiding overclaims about what an open civic poll can prove.