Voting scenario, 2020:
Time to vote once again. Hello good citizen voting registrar types. What the hell are these? Tokens? I'm voting, not riding the subway. Oh, these are how I vote. OK - let's see. Here are all the slots - President, VP, Governor, School Board... Hmm.
Maybe I'll just dump all my tokens into Ross Perot. Although then I wouldn't get to vote on the school board, but since I have no idea who any of them are anyway I don't suppose I care. Ross Perot it is.
(Enter Voting worker) - Well, time to tally the votes. Let's see, the Ross Perot box weighs exactly 518 lbs - looks like he doesn't have a chance in hell against the Bush twins for Pres/VP - theirs weighs nearly 1038. Let's see how many idiots tried to put quarters in - excellent, 42.75 in voting funding.-- +mw+, Aug 16 2006 Giving people multiple votes to divide amongst multiple candidates is a well-established voting scheme.-- DrCurry, Aug 16 2006 Yes, but is weighing them? You can weigh something to an almost arbitrary degree of accuracy these days - a great advantage when you have a disputed election. Your vote is only worth something if it is counted, and provided you can make sure no false votes slip in, literally weighing the ballots would make the counting process as easy and accurate as possible.-- +mw+, Aug 16 2006 Easy, maybe. Accurate, no. People would chuck all sorts of ballast in with their votes.-- Texticle, Aug 16 2006 Quite true - you would definitely need a sorter to kick out the junk and keep the tokens, which could be specially shaped/weighted to make it harder to fool.-- +mw+, Aug 17 2006 I tried googling "weighing the votes" but the search was polluted by people writing 'weighing' when they meant 'weighting'.-- st3f, Aug 17 2006 Tolkien voting?-- normzone, Aug 19 2006 Ouch! That's a Saur one.-- Jinbish, Aug 19 2006 Approval voting is a much better system, in a variety of ways. Each person votes for as many or as few candidates as desired; the candidate with the most "yes" votes wins.
Although a voter may have to ponder whether to grant a "yes" vote to a candidate he doesn't like as much as all the others, the only risk of a voter doing so is that his "yes" vote might help that candidate win over his other preferred candidates. There is no danger that giving support to a preferred candidate will allow some other totally-awful candidate to win.-- supercat, Aug 19 2006 [supercat]: four voters, three candidates (Bad,Good,Super) one vote for Good, two for Bad, and yours is the decisive one. Don't vote for Super, or Bad will win...-- loonquawl, Sep 29 2009 //Don't vote for Super, or Bad will win...//
Under approval voting, if you vote for Good, then Good will tie with Bad regardless of whether you also vote for Super. I see no reason not to vote for Super.-- supercat, Sep 29 2009 random, halfbakery