There has been a lot of misinformation about the new voting power changes, and I'm here to clear things up. This will be quick, because I'm crazy busy and can't really spend much time on it. But here's the message you need to get:

The only change to voting power is that your votes will be worth up to 8 times more.

That's literally it.

Now, how does this work? When you vote, a fraction of your voting power is spent on your vote; this amount gets multiplied by your Steem Power, and that's amount gets factored in to the value of whatever you voted on.

Today, the fraction of your voting power that gets spent is a 200th. Half a percent. In these examples, when I write "power level," I mean the number that you can look up on steemd.com or steemstats. So if your power level is at 100, one vote is worth 0.5 points of voting power. If your power level is at 50, one vote is worth 0.25 points of voting power.

Once the hard fork takes effect, the fraction of your voting power that gets spent goes up to a 25th. Four percent. So if your power level is at 100, a single vote will be worth a whopping 4 points of voting power. That's 8 times more powerful than it is now! If your power level is at 50, a single vote is worth 2 points; at 25, it's worth 1 point, and if your power level is at 12.5, a single vote is worth 0.5 points.

See what I did there? In the current rules, your voting power has to be at 100% for your vote to be worth 0.5 points. In the future rules, your voting power only has to be at 12.5% for your vote to be worth 0.5 points. That is, in the new system, if you vote enough to keep your voting power around 12.5%, your votes will be exactly* as powerful as they are under the old system.

That's because your vote is worth 8 times more under the new rules than it was under the old rules.

*Not exactly. There's a minor thing in the code that actually makes your vote slightly more powerful than a simple 25th of your voting power. But it will be very close.