Absolute dollar voting; new contestant

I’ve just completed the weekly vote count and update for the Vancouver Election Blog Contest ballot. Welcome new contestant Vancity Buzz!

In search of the ideal voting system design, we’re trying a new variation of dollar voting. Starting now, you vote by typing in what dollar prize you would like to award each contestant – see ballot, where I’ve given a general description and instructions. After the first week of voting, I’ll post a spreadsheet showing in detail how the tallying works.

One key reason for voting in absolute dollar amounts rather than up/down incremental adjustments is to slow down what I call “vote decay”. Most people don’t vote every week. So we can get a more information-rich consensus by using a vote for more than one week, if it hasn’t been updated by that voter. But if voting is by incremental adjustment and the ranking has changed, then it becomes less clear what last week’s vote means in the context of this week’s new ranking. That’s less of a problem with absolute-dollar voting, so old votes can meaningfully be used for more weeks.

Another nice feature of absolute dollar voting is that I can use the same ballot format for in-the-money contestants as out-of-the-money contestants. Let’s see how it goes…

Cumulative award totals

Ballot with contestant links