[godelski]

That's essentially the solution to this problem. Or you can think of it another way. Every person gets x votes (we'll say 100, but it should probably change dependent upon the ballot, which can get confusing but we'll ignore that). You can go all in on one candidate and designate all 100 votes to that one, but you forfeit voting elsewhere. Like on the general election ballot you will have the president, senators, congressional rep (what's the preferred gender neutral term?), governor, etc. You can assign all 100 votes in the presidential race and forfeit voting in the other races.

Of course, this brings a difficult problem on a national scale. Often many seats are run uncontested, even in large areas. So if we had a minimum of 1 vote per candidate, that would give certain areas and certain elections more power. You could then "hack" the election simply by running extra candidates and make it seem more contested. While I like cardinal systems, I think quadratic gets extremely complicated as soon as you try to expand it outside of a localized election and maybe it isn't worth it.

[bmn__]

> what's the preferred gender neutral term?

http://enwp.org/Congresscritter