The Voting System on Debate.org Needs VAST Improvement

In response to your first paragraph, I read that debate, and saw that you cited your sources. I am also surprised by the quickness in voting, but there's no rule on debate. org stating that once a voter votes, exactly what he or she has voted is posted on his or her profile or in the comments section. To post a voter's votes in the comments section is up to his or her discretion. Also, if you were to find out who voted so quickly on your debate, what would you do then? Would you call out this person, or threaten to get their account deactivated for abusing the voting system? A debate. org user is allowed to vote the way he or she wants, and he or she shouldn't be penalized for it. I only described the voting system that way so I could type my whole argument faster. The first two questions give no points, the third and fourth questions give one point each, the fifth question gives three points, and the sixth point gives one points. Whoever receives the most votes out of these six questions gets a bonus point. You say that your reason was to talk about the debate, and you've succeeded. But getting the debaters on debate. org to talk about it means nothing. If you have a complaint, send it to the staff of debate. org. It's like a complaint in a restaurant: if you want it known that your meal wasn't what you ordered, complaining to the other customers won't solve anything. You must complain to the employees for something to be solved. To your last sentence in your second paragraph, ("But what good is a voting system for a debate site if it merely reflects people's predetermined thoughts on the given subject? ") you have to take into account that there are people who take this site very seriously and vote based on what arguments have been given, like you and I, and there are people who push random buttons and hope that whoever they agree with wins. There's a spectrum of people on this site, and there is no way to place a number on the serious debaters and the nonsensical debaters unless you go through every single debate to figure out who votes just to vote and who votes to be fair. 1) If you can give me proof that it's been there for months, then I'll believe you. I've only been on this site for a few weeks, so I can't say that it's been there for a long time. But you can't either until you can prove that it's been there for as long as you have been a member. 2) Of course they shouldn't be voting (they meaning "nObama08," or people like that. ) They don't even have a reason to be on the site. But by joining debate. org, they're allowed to vote however they want. They can vote biased or unbiased if they want to. 3) A) I'm not sure what can be argued with this since no one knows who you are in any case. You could say this about anything relating to the users' pages. The news feed shows too much about what I've done on debate. org? No one knows who I really am. The fact that I put "N/S" on all of the big issues? No one knows who I really am, so it doesn't matter. You can see how I've voted? No one knows who I really am, so it doesn't matter. B) Like you said, no one knows who you really are. I live in a town with about 100,000 people, maybe more. If I give my age, city, state, and country, what if there's another person who is the same age as me and lives in the same city and state? Or, what's stopping me from saying I live somewhere out in Alabama when I really live in Minnesota? You can easily lie about where you live and your age, so point B is irrelevant. C) For point C, you have to take into account how much space that would take up on your page. The readers are probably thinking, "Why does this even matter? " But hear me out. Take a look at your home page, and see how organized it is. You have specific spaces for your comments, "The BIG Issues," etc. You say that you want to put the information right on the page of each voter. This means reformatting every single user's home page, which could put a pause on the entire website itself. This pause on the website could take as long as three days to three weeks, which could make many users angry. Then, a flood of complaints would come in to the debate. org's staff. They'd have to deal with the complaints AND getting the site back up. 4) You don't know whether a comment war would start once you vote. Like you said, there are people who "vote bomb. " There's no way to stop them from existing. According to what you said, once they vote, they'll "comment bomb. " They'll comment with exactly what they voted and why they voted. For example, this is something that "nObama08" would say: I voted for Pro because Obama believes in what Con said and Obama is a terrible person. " There are definitely people on this site that would start a comment fight over that. I know I would.