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Emile comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 4 - Less Wrong
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Not a bad idea; having all votes public may also be an improvement.
Still, I suspect that whatever the system, there would be someone to argue that it sucks, which isnt't an excuse to not improve it, but a reason to be cautious.
The purpose of implementing voting, as opposed to (for example) soliciting critical/praising comments, is to get more information about people's attitude towards individual comments, by lifting reasons not to signal (and thus lock the community focus better, protecting it from watering down). Commenting would be less frequent because (1) it's more difficult to comment; (2) if you have little to say, or what you'd say has already been said, you don't want to create more noise.
Requiring that votes are made public will discourage some of the voters from signaling their attitude, or otherwise distort the signal for image purposes. I'm not even sure whether voluntary public voting is a good idea, because of the image-driven distortion effect, but since it's presumably no worse than with commenting, it might not be that bad.
I will oppose that option for as long as I have breath. If it is implemented then I recommend to all participants that they find a way to game that system so as to minimize the damage.
(I'll not repeat the reasons here but I have mentioned them previously.)
Metafilter has a pretty simple system. Users can favorite posts and comments. The favorite count and the names of the favoriters are public. There are no corresponding unfavorites. Instead, the users may silently flag the post, indicating that it seems to be bad enough that a moderator should probably take a look. The moderators clean up crap comments manually, guided by the flags.