Polls

WhatsApp polls are end-to-end encrypted — vote events arrive as opaque pollUpdateMessages. Raw-Baileys adapters make you persist each poll’s messageSecret and decrypt votes yourself. Here, Zaileys decrypts votes natively: no bookkeeping, no TTLs, and it works across restarts for any poll this account sent.

Sending a poll


import { requireZaileysAdapter } from 'chat-adapter-zaileys'
 
const wa = requireZaileysAdapter(thread)
 
const poll = await wa.sendPoll({
  threadId: thread.id,
  question: 'What time works for the call?',
  options: ['10:00', '14:00', '17:00'],
  selectableCount: 1, // any other value allows multiple selections
})

Receiving votes


// every poll this account sent
wa.onPollVote((vote) => {
  console.log(vote.voter.userName, '→', vote.selectedOptions)
})
 
// scoped to one (or several) polls
wa.onPollVote(poll.id, async (vote) => {
  await thread.post(`${vote.voter.userName} picked ${vote.selectedOptions[0]}`)
})
wa.onPollVote([pollA.id, pollB.id], handler)

The ZaileysPollVote payload:

Field	Type	Notes
`threadId`	`string`	Where the poll lives
`pollMessageId`	`string`	Id of the original poll message
`question`	`string \| null`	Recovered from the message store when available
`options`	`string[]`	Same — empty if the poll left the store
`selectedOptions`	`string[]`	Current selection; empty = vote cleared
`voter`	`Author`	Chat SDK author shape
`raw`	`PollVotePayload`	The Zaileys payload

Votes as messages

By default (forwardPollVotes: true) each non-empty vote is also forwarded to the regular message pipeline with the selected options as text — so onSubscribedMessage bots see poll answers without extra code:


bot.onSubscribedMessage(async (thread, message) => {
  // a vote for "14:00" arrives as message.text === "14:00"
})

Set forwardPollVotes: false to keep votes exclusively in onPollVote.

Polls sent through any Zaileys path — wa.sendPoll, native(threadId).poll(…), even client.send(jid).poll(…) outside the adapter — all produce decryptable votes. There is no “tracked polls” registry to manage.