Due to difficulties making private voting a viable reality , we've been playing around with an alternative approach: public/private votes becomes "federated votes" where you can choose whether to send your vote off to other instances or whether it only counts locally and doesn't get federated.
There are obvious drawbacks to casting a vote that doesn't federate. But this avoids all the issues with which instances to trust (and who decides that) and avoids the distrust generated by all these sockpuppets with weird names running around and the need to explain in difficult technical detail why we're doing that, no it's not vote manipulation, don't ban / defederate us, etc etc
The video shows how the user interface could work. Basically there is a setting in your profile that determines whether your votes federate and an optional override you can use on a case-by-case basis.
There is an assumption here that people will generally choose one mode (public or private) and stick with that for most of their votes. The popup will only be used rarely so the extra clicks and the waiting involved won't be much of an issue.
Thoughts?
This sounds like a better solution than the current one. I'm not sure about the implementation of manually voting locally or federately, but that's what testing is for! It might be easiest to embed the options into the 3-dot contextual menu. Or maybe add a new button that brings up a row of new icons/options under the post/comment for extra, lesser used actions. It's kinda like a contextual menu but it's a bar of icons that shows more actions. The Boost app does this for comments by clicking on the comment, making the UI hidden and slick, less cluttered until you want to interact with it.
You could also have two numbers, a total of local + federated votes, and a number in parentheses with only local votes.