I'd still love to participate.
2. Each 'bloc' (Democrats, Republicans, Independents) has a set amount of votes divided equally among its members. For instance, if there were 10 Democrats, 5 Republicans, and 6 Independents, each bloc will get 5 votes, meaning each Democrat gets 0.5 votes, each Republican gets 1 vote, and each Independent gets 0.83 votes or something like that.
I definitely think this is the best way of doing it, so we can let everyone who wants to get involved participate without forcing Democrats to try (and fail) to pretend to be Republicans.