A couple of hours ago, I have been informed that there are discrepancies on voting results between dPoll interface and the blockchain.

Before going into details, I want to thank @abh12345 for asking me the situation privately before posting the issue into the public.

The problem

dPoll uses main posts as polls, and comments as votes. Whenever you post a poll, a secret json metadata is written to the blockchain. That's the same with votes.

• People may delete the comment from Steemit. This operation doesn't actually delete the comment but sends a signal that it's deleted. The comment operations still stay in the history of the blockchain, However,get_content_replies doesn't return the deleted comments.

• People may edit the comments with alternative Steem apps. These apps may hijack the json_metadata, therefore removes the voting_data when they're used for editing.

So, if we want to verify the dPoll interface results with blockchain, we need to have lots of checks.

The solution

I have coded a verification script in Python. It's workflow is simple:

• Get the dPoll results from dpoll API.

• Call get_content_replies. (Asking data to the blockchain directly.)

• Check each comment's json metadata to see if the dPoll vote is there. If it's not, add the missing votes into a missing_votes list.

• For each missing vote, check if the author deleted a dpoll vote comment. If that's the case, mark the vote as correct.

• If the author didn't delete the comment, then check for author's account history to see any other dApp overwrites the json_metadata. If that's the case, mark the vote as correct.

After all these processes, if there are still missing votes on the blockchain, then we can say we can say we have a problem at dPoll side.

Output of the audit script

Source code of the audit script

• https://gist.github.com/emre/28414c16a03546183f8eaf6a886a7cb5

TL;DR

Regarding @theycallmedan's 10k SP delegation poll:

• There are 2 votes registered on dPoll doesn't have a blockchain reference. (@steemitwitchery, @harmonyval to SteemitBloggers). This looks like a bug in our end. It might be related to this, I need to check the logs and update the code to behave more defensive/transactional. This will be addressed soon.

• There are lots of accounts deleted their comment. (mostly clustered around TEAM-CN choice.) This makes verifying hard. So, if you need to verify, you should also loop through the account history of missing voters.

• There are users edited their comment from alternative interfaces like Partiko. Some interfaces hijack the json_metadata and overwrite their values, there. So, they remove the votes, actually. That's why an account history loop is also required here, too.