At least one post was made about these ideas 9 months ago. 

https://steemit.com/steem/@ats-witness/steem-witnesses-vote-number-and-decay

And there were others.

Interesting. I wonder which would be an easier change at the coding level? I personally like 5 votes per account, but your way would work as well.

Yep, which is part of what is wrong with this system. The foxes are watching the hen house. We need to make these changes and we need to make them as soon as possible. One or two stake holders should not be able to select all 20 top witnesses...

That is not false at all, it is a general statement that is absolutely accurate. The top 20 witnesses are in fact being decided basically by a couple of the largest stake holders. That is a fact. All are receiving a vote from one of the top couple whales. That means that you have 2-3 whales basically dictating the direction of the entire platform. How do you not see that as a problem?

>and also ultimately the way it is supposed to work. 

Perhaps if the goal is to just have the richest person dictating things for the entire platform, then yes this is how it is supposed to work. However, many people have touted that having witnesses elected by the people helps decentralize the governing process, which it absolutely does.

As a counter example, if one malicious group were to acquire enough stake they could vote in all of the top 20 witnesses themselves, yes it would require a big stake, but it could be done in theory, they could vote in all 20 of "their" people and guide the entire platform in the direction they want or just crash the chain to watch it burn.

While that may sound extreme, there are people out there that do things just like that, in fact there are even some on this chain already.

Yes, that is unlikely, but it is still possible.

Reducing the number of witness votes per account makes that much harder to do.

> I think the bigger concern might be people not voting at all

Yes, and that is because their vote literally makes no difference. If votes were maxed out at 10 or even better 5 it would allow for a much more democratic witnesses structure and it would make more votes 'matter' which in turn would likely incentivize more people to actually vote.

Not only that but it would also continually encourage witnesses to do things in the best interest of their voters, a la more of the community at large, which isn't exactly what we have going on right now. As it stands now, in most cases, you just have to cater to a couple of the largest accounts and you are in.

>you don't want relatively small(er) amounts of stake to ever be able to elect any witness, and certainly not multiple witnesses 

But why not actually?
People use to describe this situation as an "attack", but for me only the ability to put in "one's own" irreversible transaction deserves this term.
What actuall harm can perform *one malicious witness*?

Can't see it without logging in. It seems to be that we need a witness vote total less than whatever the decision making witness total is. Meaning that if 20 witnesses decide things, we need less than 20 votes, ideally significantly less to mitigate the largest accounts splitting their stake... Something like 5 votes per account seems like a good place to start.