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As I approach a voting milestone on ServerFault (unless I get hit by a bus, sometime in the next couple weeks I'll be the first person to vote 10,000 times), I'm wondering if a new badge would help encourage people to vote more.

How about a "Ballot Box Stuffer" or maybe "Diebold" (in honor of the voting machine company) for someone who votes a lot? If you use all 40 votes per day, that's ~1200 votes per month, but there needs to be some leeway for votes you "lose" when questions are migrated. So how about a silver or gold badge for someone who:

  • voted at least 1000 times (or maybe even higher, 1100?) per month for 6 months, or
  • voted at least 3300 times in a quarter (or 3500?), or
  • voted 10,000 times (there are only 7 people on SO who've done this and as far as I can see, none on any other site)

I'm not sure about other sites, but on SF there aren't a lot of people who vote much (only 14 people have voted more than 40 times this week), so maybe a shiny new badge would encourage them a bit.

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    I believe the badge with the highest vote requirement is Electorate: 600 votes with 25% of them on questions. So a badge for more than 1000 votes seems a bit excessive, though still interesting.
    – Toomai
    Commented Nov 25, 2011 at 19:08
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    Diebold - Are you suggesting 80% of your votes have just disappeared with no trace?
    – random
    Commented Nov 25, 2011 at 19:09
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    Why does voting need encouragement? There's already a zero-skill gold badge (Electorate) to encourage people. If that's not enough pull, they won't increase voting anyway (such as myself; I rarely see a question that I find genuinely useful for society); and if you're the guy with 500 rep who has that gold badge, you'll probably continue the voting spree anyway.
    – Kerrek SB
    Commented Nov 25, 2011 at 19:09
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    Suffrage, Civic Duty, Electorate... There are already several badges for voting.
    – Shog9
    Commented Nov 25, 2011 at 20:19
  • Not commenting on the merits of the suggestion, but calling it Diebold could run into trademark issues.
    – Keith Thompson
    Commented Nov 25, 2011 at 20:28
  • @Shog9: They're all easy to get especially if vote early and often.
    – user147520
    Commented Nov 25, 2011 at 22:03
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    What is about "thunderbold"?
    – avpaderno
    Commented Nov 25, 2011 at 22:04
  • 2
    @Ward: Congrats on your 10K votes!
    – Daniel
    Commented Dec 8, 2011 at 20:35

2 Answers 2

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I have voted about 11,000 times at tex.stackexchange. My main voting incentive is "separating the wheat from the chaff", i.e., seeing the good answers rise to the top of question pages (and the not-so-good ones fall into oblivion). A secondary incentive is making sure that users with many good answers will accumulate reputation and therefore be able to assist in moderating our site.

I don't need another voting-based badge to encourage me to continue voting. In fact, I think I earned the "Electorate" badge with too little effort, and would appreciate it if the absolute number of question votes required for this badge would rise from 600 to, say, 1,000.

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I am opposed to this feature request, because it would incentivize voting for the wrong reasons.

Back when this question was first asked, we didn't have the review queues that we have now. But the presence of the "Steward" badge has shown that there are people who are willing to robo-click their way through anything just to get a badge, without regard for the health of the sites.
And since voting is anonymous and meant to be free, it isn't even moderated beyond suspicions of voting fraud.

The real reward for diligent voting, is that you have contributed to the health of the site. It is less direct and less visible than a badge, but much more useful in the long run.

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