WRT the moderator voting, what is with all the down votes? I gave one up vote (I could have given three but picked one) for the one I thought would be best as a moderator. What do down votes have to do with this?

@ShadoCat If you are talking about the Questionnaire post then the reason is that the meta post is just a way for you to read up on the candidates position on several topics. The voting is basically meaningless, which is why we are trying to keep the votes equal to not give the impression that one of the positions is better than the others. The voting begins in three days.

You can read more about it here (Disclosure: that answer is from me)

@Secespitus @Secespitus, that makes more sense. Thanks for the link. It just seemed like someone messing with the system. I guess I'll have to make sure I'm around for the actual voting. This sort of attention to detail is why I had no thought of nominating myself. :-)

@ShadoCat No problem. You'll have a couple days to vote by the way, so no need to worry too much about missing it.

@ShadoCat There was a short discussion on it starting here:

@HDE226868 Thank you. I now see Michael's comment to the top post. It might prevent some confusion if you add that to the post itself.

@ShadoCat Strangely enough, that hadn't occurred to me. Someone suggested using a post notice, but we can't do custom ones. Editing the post itself makes sense.

Done.

shame there's not a way to disable voting on particular threads in meta

@HDE226868 Glad I could help. I am a (arguably) valuable source of "out of the left field" ideas.

@MarshallTigerus The only way to do that would be to lock the post, but that would also prevent people from adding new answers.

@MarshallTigerus We could lock each answer individually, but that would mean the authors can't edit them. Narrower locks - like comment-only ones - have been requested by mods for a while. So . . . yeah. I agree.

Not sure someone's suggested a vote-only lock before. meta.stackexchange.com/q/124749/274942 calls for more specific locks, which is sort of a step in that direction.

@HDE226868 I don't see a lot of other usecases besides elections for something like that.

Yeah, probably not.

A general lock might work with some coordination. It would require someone to unlock it when someone has something legitimate to add and then re-lock it after.

meta.stackexchange.com/q/273468/274942 is also similar. Although that would be applied on questions, and stop answers from being posted. But still, a variation.

I agree it seems like an edge case