That's you're option, of course. The idea is to give a "balanced" option to vote the way you think. Ideally, you should be able to split your vote up as many ways as you like and have all of your positive and negative votes divided by the number of votes that you used... in this case, 1.

The problem with the ideal balanced voting system is that it would be more difficult to set up and to count. If it was not "computerized" it would probably cost a fortune to do in a real election.

There are many variations possible of a balanced voting system and this poll represents just one of them. I wanted to show that it would be easy to set up "some kind of" balanced voting system that would better represent the diversity of opinions in an actual election. For example, given the same options, some people would only vote FOR someone and others would only vote AGAINST someone. In order to allow more than 5 candidates in the list within the limitations of the current poll setup options at this site, I had to split the vote onto two pages... which then allows also the option to vote both FOR someone and AGAINST someone. The "simplest" way to do the math then is to subtract the AGAINST votes form the FOR votes. An alternative way to get a net vote count would be to first identify which people voted twice and reduce the value of each of their two votes to one half, so that each voted who chose to vote gets the value of exactly one vote, and then re-add the FOR votes, and subtract the AGAINST votes for each candidate. As you can see, this is much more complicated and would do very little to make the process more fair... but would be very reasonable ona computerized voting system with a program written specifically for that purpose. Keep in mind that of course there will still be people who don't vote at all even though they have an opinion that they would like to express, simply because they still don't see a way to express their opinion accurately. Those people of course won't get counted at all. In that case, they could cast a "None of the Above" vote without a write-in, allowing them to express that none of the choices they had could express what they wanted to say. This would of course not effect the election but could be useful data for future electoral reform.