Vote Guy Fawkes!

Wow. Today is both US Election Day, and Guy Fawkes Day.

Makes you want to blow up the US Congress, doesn't it?

Okay, maybe that's just me.

I voted.

I'm not real happy with what I did and how. I don't feel like I *had* great choices.

I voted for Green Party for governor.

If Romney wins, I'm almost certain that it will be by a margin which will be less than what the Green Party gets. In other words, if Romney wins, it'll be because of people like me. And I'm not happy about that.

But I just don't like O'Brien that much. And I really like Dr. Stein. And I realized that I'd feel bad about not voting for someone I liked. Frankly, since I had a chance to vote for someone I agreed with, instead of "disagreed with less", I went for it.

Other than that, I voted a mostly Democratic ticket.

The questions: Question 1, like all sane people, I think that governments should be allowed to have money in order to do stuff, so I voted "no". Question 2: even if immersion works better, I'm not happy having it mandated by law.

Alternate voting methods

As we all know, there is no voting method which is "fair" for all definitions of "fair", in elections which have more than two candidates. But as I was debating with myself who to vote for for Massachusetts governor, I started wondering about other methods.

As it is, I think I'd like a method in which you could vote for as many candidates as you want. You'd look at your ballot, and mark as many or few as you wanted to. You could vote for just one, as you do today. You could vote for everybody except one person, if you just really didn't like someone.

Or you could, as I wanted to, vote for the person that you WANTED to win, and also vote for the person who had a chance to win that you would RATHER have than the other option.

So, what I was wondering is, what is the downside (or downsides) to this method?