On Oct 14, 2010, at 5:05 PM, Martin.Mulone wrote: > > how about having 5 votes?. and you can add or delete your vote, but > only you have in total 5 votes. 5 votes or 3,6,9,etc.
Cumulative voting (this) or approval voting (vote for as many as you like, but only one vote for each candidate) are conceptually simple, but they introduce a rather nasty strategy issue: voting for anything but your single favorite can hurt your favorite's chances. That said, approval voting is not a bad idea for an informal poll like this, and it'd be easy to implement: simply remove the restriction that a voter can only vote for one candidate, and add the ability to "unvote" for a candidate. A ranked method, either a Condorcet method like Schulze, or single-winner STV (usually called IRV or AV) are better choices (though there's a kind of religious war between the Condorcet and STV camps, or at least a subset of them). OpenSTV, a Python-based vote counter that I sometimes contribute to, supports both.
