Since I'm a saint now, I can tell people not to bother about XP, for it doesn't mean anything (ever noticed that mostly saints say that? ;-) Anyways, it's true to some extend. Before I reached my sainthood, I truely appreciated a lot of ++ votes, for I liked to gain a higher level. But after some point (I think for me it was after reaching the "friar status") I stopped caring about it too much, for I had seen monks with better knowledge of Perl and less XP than me. I believe a lot of monks have better knowledge of Perl than me (probably the majority) and a lot of them didn't make sainthood yet, so yeah, XP doesn't mean anything.

Something I refrained from doing (too much ;-) was whining about it. I have posted nodes that initially got -1 or -2, but ended up highly in the positives. This is also the case with your specific node. At this very moment, you got a +17 ranking for that node and I even downvoted it (amongst probably many others). Why? I didn't get to see your node without the update. If you didn't bitch about getting a negative ranking, I wouldn't have voted at all. I only vote up when I read something that I should have written, or when someone writes something that I find contributing to the discussion/question. Besides that, that URL was posted here, and here, and here, and here, and here before, so to me, it wasn't worth an upvote to begin with.

Yes, you can find flaws in the voting system (especially if you don't agree with the majority that vote at a given time), but if you have suggestions to make it better, I believe the gods are more than interesting to hear about it.

One thing I do disagree with is "doing nothing is like casting a - vote". Doing nothing can both work in your favor and in your disadvantage, so IMHO, you're just wrong there. We can't all vote for each individual node, so at some point you'll have to do "nothing". Your bad that I had votes left to downvote your posting.

Another thing I disagree with is your idea of getting rid of the downvote option. "If you don't gain too many votes on your node, you'll know that it's probably not well received. But it's achieved without the - votes.". The only differance that makes is that you don't lose XP, and it seems to me, that's all that really bothers you.

In an electoral poll (assuming a compulsory voting system), you either cast a vote on a certain candidate or you cast an empty vote (an invalid vote). I don't think you can cast a - vote on any candidate.

As PodMaster finely puts it: "nobody is trying to elect you". So this analogy is just plain wrong.