Can Device ID be duplicated?

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1

Hello all,
I have gone through almost all the topics that talks about "DeviceID" on this platform and I understood that it's not 100% consistent in terms of it appearance (like it can be in the form of a MAC address, Android ID, WiFi ID, IMEI, etc)

My question is,
I created a voting form online for people to vote on a national award ceremony and one of the criteria is to "Vote only once".

So when I looked at the device Id in the data I realised that there are so many duplicate IDs (but the main problem is the responses thaf these duplicate ids gave, they are totally different from each other (like the location, gender and voting categories, etc)

Is it possible that two or more devices can have the same device id considering the issue with " device IDs"? Thanks!

You can check the online form here too.

https://enketo.ona.io/x/#dX53UPnK

2

Definitely, and even worse, many devices will change MAC address after every restart.

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3

Is there any way to have unique Numbers from devices? Apart from Serial Numbers, device ids, phone numbers, coz most of the time it doesn't even work.

4

As far as I know, there's no easy way to guarantee uniqueness.

In ODK Collect, typically, the device ID is mostly unique, but I've seen cases where one make/model of device will have the same device ID! In Enketo, it will generate an ID for a browser-device combo, but again, I doubt it's guaranteed to be unique.

If you have a known group of enumerators, you could generate a PIN before hand for each enumerator and have them enter that to help tease out real submissions.

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