Quote:
Originally Posted by Hamlet53
My point exactly about the advantage of open polling results.
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As with Nyssa (but for different reasons), I am also torn. Open polling, in a way, skews mostly to those who quickly vote first, because they determine the "front runners" that the strategic voters will wait to decide on.
Any strategic voter will only matter if a vote is close. I haven't looked, and someone else may look and let us know, but if I were guessing, I'd say in the last year the vote was close enough for a strategic voter to change the outcome maybe at most a third of the votes? So a strategic voter's votes will really only ever matter a portion of the time, and even then an opposing strategic voter may cancel any strategic voter's vote out. Then there are the non-strategic late voters, whose votes seem to often be cast into the nether in an open vote if not for a leading candidate, since those waiting strategic voters wouldn't think of voting for a selection that wasn't already in the running to win.
So really, the quick first voters' votes tend to matter the most, which in a way doesn't seem so equal.
And hidden polls are more exciting to find out the results when the poll is over.
On the other hand, simply from a "fun" point of view, open voting leads to more interesting conversation while the vote is going on, and often in the past year the majority of our conversations, for better or worse, have occurred during voting. There have been a few very close votes that were a lot of fun to watch progress (May!).
This is why I like the idea of the simple compromise of switching back and forth between the months. So for instance in 2012, January, March, May, etc. could be open and February, April, June, etc. could be hidden, and then for 2013 they could be reversed (to allow each category to experience each type of vote), and so on and so forth.
The only thing is this would be a bit more for Tom to keep up with (he'd have to be careful each month to post the right kind of poll), so it's also pending his approval.