What kind of threshold should a vote have to pass before being implemented? Do we really want to be making changes based on a vote that only got one “Aye”? Ten Ayes? Over 50% of the user base?
What kind of vote engagement can we reasonably expect to achieve? Is it actually likely that 50% of the user base will engage with any particular vote? Are there any useful presidents out there?
Who should be responsible for counting the votes when they’re over? Perhaps the OP tallies the votes and edits the post?
Is there an easy test the mods can apply to a tallied vote to allow them to check whether it’s passed? Something that is not open to interpretation and results in a clear directive to make a change?
I’m also kind of testing out this discussion format as a way of generating things to vote on i.e DISCUSSION > POLL > VOTE seems to make sense.
We’ll see :)
Having a secret ballot is my only concern
I’m all for a secret ballot, but unless there’s something I haven’t thought of yet, it doesn’t seem feasible right now.
The way I’ve seen it discussed is having a proposal post with 3 comments like “Aye”, “Nay”, and “Abstain” and users would upvote those to determine what passes, so secret ballot.
Problems I see at first glance are:
You can upvote “Aye” and downvote “Nay” and /or “Abstain” for example, which would skew a poll with more than two options. Way to fix this I suppose could be to make sure everyone always upvotes their choice and always downvotes all the other choices.
The votes are secret (which is good), but how many of those votes came from users of this instance versus those that aren’t? If you see an “Aye” next to a username you can easily check that they’re a sh.itjust.works user and tally the vote accordingly, as far as I know that’s not possible with just upvotes/downvotes, you just get the total. If there’s some way for modtools to filter those votes to just users from this instance it would solve the problem.
In the end I think a secret ballot is a good choice, but until there’s a way to filter out votes from outside sh.itjust.works for the “Ayes”, “Nays”, and “Abstains” secret voting would be too easy to abuse.