The biggest problem in Livejournal's code was that they restricted people to a finite number of picks from a list of candidates, rather than numbering their votes. The handling of tied eliminations was also sloppy, eliminating all candidates involved in a tie; preference tends to be a countback method and/or conditional eliminations.

Agreed. I like the idea of caching the results if the process takes calculation as well.

Need to work on a 'how this would display' mockup at some point, but can leave that until it's agreed for implementation and put ideas into Bugzilla.