Moderator primary scores should either be shown or not shown

Question

On moderator primary election pages (SO #1, SU #1, Programmers #1), scores are reported in a weird way:

score = max(upvotes - downvotes, my_vote)

(or something approaching), i.e. if the candidate had more downvotes than upvotes then what I see is -1/0/+1 depending on my vote for that candidate. This doesn't make any sense: either show the totals, or don't show the totals, or show the totals on demand — but don't show a meaningless figure.

Note that this is not about who should see the totals or whether to show the totals. This is about having totals that are actually totals.

Answer 1

This is by design, and I think you'll be status-declined since it appears there was some thought put into it. To quote Dr. Mrozek:

There was talk during the SO election that massively negative scores was unnecessarily demoralizing; the point of the primary is to find the 10 best candidates, not to say "this person is ridiculously awful and deserves hundreds of downvotes" – Michael Mrozek Feb 8 at 22:13

You'll also note that you can just click on the score to see the breakdown if you really want to.

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I believe the score shown is (scoreWithoutMyVote + abs(scoreWithoutMyVote))/2 + myVote. I.e.:

If you haven't voted

• Score shown is 0 if total is negative, otherwise the "real" score
  • e.g. -4 is shown as 0, +4 is shown as 4

If you have voted

• Score is shown as -1 if total is negative and voted down
• Score is shown as +1 if total is <= 1 and voted up
• Score is shown as the "real" score if total >= 2 and voted up