The question about whether or not to continue pinning accepted answers at the top of the answers list is closing soon and it's a very tight race. In fact, it's even closer than it looks.
Right now, according to the votes everyone can see, maintaining the status quo is winning 17 to 16 over change. But if you look at the breakdown of up and down votes, it's [+19 -2] for status quo, and [+20 -4] for change, which means according to the upvotes only, change is winning 20-19.
Which way will it be counted?
If we count downvotes towards the total, then I can either upvote the option I want, or upvote the option I want and downvote the option I don't want, thereby cancelling out someone else's vote. And six people have done this already.
Should we all rush to cast our second vote and do an awareness campaign to get everyone else to do so? As it stands, this would result in a final vote of -1 for status quo, and +1 for change. Most voters won't realize that they can also downvote their "dispreferred" option for double effect, so some people's votes will be represented doubly. All of that seems ridiculous.
Assuming nobody downvoted without upvoting too --I think a fair assumption-- the number of upvotes represents the actual number of people who want each option, and the number of downvotes means nothing and should be discarded.
So, I propose that if we're currently intending to count based on net votes, that we change to only count upvotes. And whatever the final case, it should state clearly in very visible font in the question either that the apparent vote doesn't reflect the true vote and only privileged users can see the true vote count, OR that downvotes count as much as upvotes and everyone should vote twice.
