Negative voting has already been proposed and that will help us to be able to indicate poorly considered or contraversial proposals to help the better written more general poposals stand out better. However this may itself be contraversial and a source of potential abuse.
Joining proposals has also been proformed, but this too could potentially cause issues with two similar proposals being different enough that there may be a difference of opinion. This process would need to be handled very carefully, probably with both features marked for potential merging and both open for discussion, or perhaps a 'parent proposal' being added that links to child proposals and claims all their votes as it's own. Though that may mot be possible with the architecture of the propsal database.
Another thing that can help would be to implement a filter system. This would not alter the way the voting system functions, but instead make it easier and less initimidating and frustrating to use. It could be as simple as a checkbox to show only open proposals(the ones that can accept votes) or keywords added to the text search (ie. +avatars -ack -done -wontdo ). Of course a more complex set of filters would be more powerful and help different kinds of searches. Such as after a release which ever Lindens manage the voting could search for Acknowledged, but not Completed proposals (hint hint, the groups proposals added in 1.12 haven't been marked as completed as of when I wrote this)
But the most typical use case that is the new user with 10 fresh new votes who thinks the game is pretty good, hasn't run into any glaring missing features and just wants to see what cool new features are waiting for their votes. Instead of seeing only the proposals they can vote on, they see everything ever proposed.
As far as the duplicate features issue, that is another use case where new proposers aren't doing their research before posting. Perhaps gving them a first screen that asks their proposal title then perfoms keyword searches for it, asking the potential proposer if they would rather vote for one of these...
I hope this will help save residents and Lindens using the voting system some time and frustration. I know we are all frustrated and don't think the Lindens spend enough time looking at feature proposals. Hopefully this will help them to get more done in what time they spend. }}

Has anyone thought of this before?
Any Comments?