So I'm looking at trying to solve this problem:
I have N-individuals who're trying to determine the relative priority of M-projects. We decided to start off with a voting scheme which was something like - every individual can vote from 0 to 5 for any of the project (abstaining is equal to 0). Then we sum up the votes for each project and order them based off that.
While I trust the people I work with, I'm wondering if there's a better way to do this. There are obviously some issues with this - where you can just always vote 5 and your votes will have far more power.
We mostly picked this because we are voting in a Google Spreadsheets (new items can get added and it's not reasonable to have people vote in other ways) - so I am also looking for something that would be relatively easy to add to a Google Sheet and is also easy to explain to people.
What are some good ways of solving this problem?
STAR Voting was invented exactly to discourage this kind of strategic voting, and has a Google sheets implementation
https://www.equal.vote/star_election_calculator
(Note that the runoff could conceivably make the outcome less representative than without, if voters are honest, but Arrow/Gibbard/et al proved that that's a trade-off you have to make with every voting method. STAR gets generally good reviews as a good compromise between different competing criteria.)