One of the difficulties of such a large and disparate community like Flyertalk is that most users really only hang out in a small subset of the forums not least because there aren't enough hours in the day to follow more than a few on a regular basis. This being so, we only come across a small proportion of the Flytertalk members sufficiently much to form an opinion as to whether we would like them on the board.

The problem then is that I see a list of, say, 20 members standing for election to 9 posts. Of these 20 I might know 2: one of whom I would be very much in favour of being on the board, but one of whom I feel strongly should not. Deciding how to vote is a problem. Clearly I vote for the person I support, but how do I register my disapproval of the other person I know? There are 18 other names there, none of which I know, so I can't reasonably vote for any of them.

It sems to me that the best answer would be to have positive (I want this person to be on the board) and negative (I really do not want this person to be on the board) votes, and that they should be totalled on a simple arithmetic basis.

At first sight this seems easy to do. What does everyone think?