Open Ballot Voting System?

Does anyone know how to accomplish an open ballot voting system? I’ve looked hard with no luck. Here’s the requirements:

Users can take a survey that allows them to enter any possible answer (eg, Best Album).

Users submit any answer (eg, Hunky Dory – David Bowie)

The vote is tallied and can be viewed in the admin panel or vote query showing the top albums by vote:
Hunky Dory – David Bowie (44)
Plastic Beach – Gorillaz (27)
Magnetic Fields – 69 Love Songs (18)

Also would like to utilize jquery autocompletion to make similar answers exactly identical (useful for tallying votes?)

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I’ve started on an understanding of what I need — but could really use some help here! I’m sure this would be easier to accomplish with a custom plugin, but here’s the method I have at hand:

Create a custom post type called Ballots that hides the title field. Ideally this would increment with each new ballot (eg, Ballot 1, Ballot 2, Ballot 3).

Then use Custom Field Template top create the ballot from custom fields, having the key refer to the question and the value being the answer to the question.

Then the complicated part:

For each custom field key (ballot question), I need to rank all ballots by the custom field value count.

To explain again, I need to count how many ballots have the same value (for that specific custom field) and then list (rank?) the top three. As well, would like to display how many ballots have that value.

Additionally, add jquery autocompletion to the ballot that checks the entered value against existing ballot custom field values. This should allow for better tallying of votes since similar names will be enter as exact existing values.

Whew…

Any advice, code, or otherwise would be a huge help!

Thanks!

-Anthony