I've been thinking of a couple potential concepts to maybe help renew interest in vote chess.

1. Introduce "team leaders." They could be chosen by group election, highest rating, or on the basis of admin/regualar member. These team leaders would:

• Be able to set an alloted time where no voting can take place at the beginning of each turn. (When voting is able to take place, another message should be sent to all participants)
• Have their votes shown on the screen for all members to see such as: "Team Leader _______ suggests we vote 14.Bd2".

2. Allow members to re-vote if desired. (And by this I mean that their previous vote is cancelled, and only the new one counts).

3. Possibly have rating ranges for certain games so that weaker (or sometimes stronger ) players will be able to have a greater say in the direction of the game.

Thanks for reading! If you have any other ideas, write them here.

I like suggestions #1 and #2 but I don't know about #3 -- what's the incentive for the weaker players to participate (and learn from the stronger ones) if their votes don't count for much.

I'd previously suggested the idea of a nomination phase similar to the blackout phase suggested in #1 whereby the team would be broken into two groups based on rating and there would be two rounds -- a nomination round in which one group does a preliminary vote, and a voting round in which the second group chooses from the top 3-5 options of the first.  I think this would be better for letting stronger players have more say in the game's direction (assuming they were the group chosen to nominate).

 I'm not sure if we're on the same page about my third suggestion. I was thinking about having rating restrictions like those in team matches or tournaments. I wasn't thinking about stronger players having 2 votes while everyone else has one. I'm sorry if I phrased it in a confusing way.

Ahh, I see.  It was the "greater say in the direction of the game" part that implied that the weaker players would have a "lesser say in the direction of the game".  What you're actually suggesting then, is that the stronger players get one vote while the weaker ones get zero.

I think that's a fair request.