Voting: Promoting and Demoting Blog Entries

On a trial basis, I've added a new feature to the blog:  voting on, promotion and demotion of blog entries. 

I'd like to see how well it works, and see if the community thinks this is a worthwhile feature on the site. 

Everyone should see a little pair of arrows immediately at the top left of every post.  For registered users, these arrows are enabled for voting.

If everything functions correctly, here's how it should work:

• Voting on blog entries will only be available to registered users.  I enjoy anonymous participation and appreciate the value that it brings to this community.  However, allowing anonymous voting on blog entries opens up too many possibilities for abuse.  If you want to remain anonymous, please take a moment to register an anonymous screen name.  I don't care if you use a free email address, and I don't really care who you are - I just want you to pick a user name, register it, log in, and vote/write/comment as much as you'd like.
• Registered users will only be able to vote once per blog entry.  An "up" vote counts as +1 point towards the score of that blog entry. 
• Similarly, a "down" vote counts as -1 point.
• Once you've voted on a blog entry, your vote will be "remembered" and displayed when you're viewing that particular post.  For example, if you voted "up," the up arrow will be orange.
• Blog entries that are not yet on the front page will be promoted to the front page when they reach a total net score of +10 points.  In this way, I hope to allow the community to promote excellent blog entries, regardless of who authored it.  This will open up access to the front page to all authors, not just the handful that currently can promote their own posts.
• Blog entries that are on the front page will be removed from the front page when they reach a total net score of -10 points.  These entries will still show in the Tracker, in the Latest Comments and Latest Blog Entries blocks, and on an author's individual blog, but they won't remain on the front page.
• Point totals for promotion/demotion can and will be adjusted depending on whether we think they're too low or too high, etc.
• Everyone, even non-registered users, can view the point totals and votes on a blog entry.  For an example, go here.  Every blog entry will have a page like that, even if there are no votes yet.  See the UPDATE below - I'm hiding the vote totals in the hopes that a "secret ballot" will encourage more voting.
• I have no idea if this is working yet.  Cast some votes and help test it!
• I've added a link to this post to the menu that appears just below the banner at the top of the page, just to the right of "Instructions."
• I'd like to move those arrows to underneath the post (by the "IlliniPundit's blog..." line) but I haven't yet figured out how to do so.  (Any help doing so would be greatly appreciated.  I'm using the Vote Up/Down module, and roughly following these instructions.)

Please let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, thoughts or advice.  I'm excited about this feature.  It's one of the main reasons that I moved IP.com to Drupal six months ago.  It will empower our registered users even more than they already are, making this truly a community-driven news and discussion site.  I hope that adding it will allow you to have even greater access to the types of news that you want to find on here.

UPDATE:  I fixed the link to the example of voting results.  I had mistakenly restricted access, but you can now see an example here.  There'll be a similar vote page for every blog entry on the site.

Also, I'm lowering the threshold for promotion to the front page to +5, to try and get things moving a bit.

UPDATE:  I've moved the widget to the bottom of every post, rather than the top.  I'm also hiding the vote totals, to hopefully encourage more voting.