There has been a proposal for not using replies for voting.
This is cleaner and doesn’t expose everyone’s votes to anyone reading the thread.
I have a notion of how this would look, so I’m creating this discussion and the replies for each option as an example. Please discuss or upvote any of the options I wrote below, and we can all see how this would look.
Should registration of this instance be:
The discussion should really happen in another post before the voting. Possibly even in another community.
The order you see the options that exist on the ballot should not matter.
This proposal doesn’t involve down voting any options at all.
I agree that order shouldn’t matter, but I strongly believe it would matter given the fact that everyone knows that upvoted posts appear at the top by default. The proposal doesn’t address downvoting, but it will happen anyway and affect the outcome because of the ordering issue. Discussions will happen inside the voting thread even if it shouldn’t happen, as well.
You can try to game the vote with discussions or down votes, but I think moderation actions should be used to punish that kind of thing
It doesn’t change anything if the options are reordered, as a voter you still need to read all of them to decide to support or not.