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I don't understand it at all.

All it has is people strategically voting on example questions, leading to all questions having ~10 votes. It means that good questions that have been asked recently don't attract votes. So the definition of the proposals will tend to be based on simply the earliest asked questions, rather than the best questions.

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Having unlimited ability to vote won't keep over-zealous followers from just voting for everything. At least now they have to make some decisions about what they wish to tout as the formative questions to represent their proposal.

You can't really control how and why users wish to vote, but if folks want to play this game of shuffle-the-vote assembly line, they do so at their own peril. The Community Team evaluates every proposal about half way through the Commitment process, and pushing a half-baked proposal through makes it that much likely it will be rejected in the final evaluation. And there's nothing saying that a poorly-supported launch is going to make it out of private beta.

So there's much more to this than a simple numbers game.

There is a growing contingent of users who realize that if you are only voting to push the proposal through regardless of substance, you are only hurting your prospects of launching a successful site. Take a look at my answer in this discussion about

Prevent up-votes for questions at 10 or more

It is my belief that the efforts to shuffle votes "efficiently" over any other consideration is what doomed the competitive programming proposal by pushing it through before it could be demonstrated that it could be a useful site.

So we're not looking to compound the problem of users pushing proposals through by voting indiscriminately. Allowing unlimited voting will only hasten the problem of launching a site with insufficient momentum and support to actually sustain a healthy community.

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    If the system of progression means that people are gaming it in order to progress, it means that your system broken, not the users.
    – dwjohnston
    May 23, 2014 at 3:15
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    @dwjohnston So...because people can game the system, it's the system's fault, not the users? That logic makes no sense at all.
    – fbueckert
    May 23, 2014 at 12:08
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    @dwjohnston Ha, yeah; I've been saying that Area 51 has been broken for awhile, except that it still creates great sites. So if bad behaviors are not getting sites created, how does that make the system "broken"?
    – Robert Cartaino
    May 23, 2014 at 13:38
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    @RobertCartaino There have been failures, and you aren't counting the great sites that might have come to exist if Area 51 had worked better.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    May 23, 2014 at 18:30
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It means that you should vote for the ones you think are good questions. By not limiting the number of upvotes, people would just upvote every single question, in an attempt to move past definition faster. This way, you need to judge which questions you believe are the best, and vote accordingly. This makes votes have much more weight, so that it's easier to tell which questions are more valuable to the members.

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