Time frame for voting on a "quick question" ballot was defined as 8am - 12pm EDT, however when some participants tried to vote, they received a message stating that voting would occur between 12 pm - 4 pm, and thus were locked out of voting.
The most likely reason for this discrepancy is a time zone mismatch. The voting period in PollUnit is interpreted based on the viewer’s local time (browser/system time zone), while the configured time (8am-12pm EDT) is tied to a specific time zone.
In your case, it looks like some participants were seeing the time window converted into their own local time, which would explain why it appeared as 12pm-4pm instead of 8am-12pm EDT, effectively locking them out when trying to vote "too early".
If you believe this might have a different cause, feel free to share the admin link with support@pollunit.com so we can take a closer look at your setup and investigate what happened.
Hi Markus, thank you for reply. However the poll was created in NY (EDT) and all participants were also in NY (EDT). I will send the admin link to the support email address as requested.
Thanks for your help!
Thank you for the link. At first glance, everything appears to be working as expected.
I’m located in Germany (CEST, UTC+2), and I see a participation window from 2026-04-18 14:00 to 18:00, which correctly corresponds to the New York time zone (EDT, UTC-4) of 2026-04-18 08:00 to 12:00.
I still believe this is related to a time zone setting issue. We determine a user’s time zone based on their settings, not their physical location (which we may not have access to). This is standard practice.
It would be helpful if you could contact one of the users experiencing the mismatch and ask them to provide a screenshot of the footer on our page. The footer displays the time zone currently set in the user’s profile or detected from their system preferences.
Please note that the time zone information is not shown in the support forum footer. You can see an example on PollUnit or in your survey.