Despite the number of people who cared enough to vote in the poll, this actual news item only has 3 points. Should it automatically vote the item up when you vote in a poll? (On the other hand, polls would pretty much take over the front page.)
And yes; one of the worst things that happened to Reddit was the proliferation of Vote-Up-If posts.
Don't get me wrong, I like politics and I personally think Ron Paul has a lot going for him. But I didn't start reading the site for its political bent; I started reading it for the interesting links and the tech stuff. I'd simply like to get my political news elsewhere. With the bastardized reddit, I couldn't get away from politics, even with the introduction of sub-reddits.
Here's I think it's interesting that we can basically run a survey experiment based on the choices offered. For instance, we can see that the age of YC.news users is a slightly skewed distribution with a mean of of maybe 24-25 (even as we could nail it down more with smaller bins). To me, that's much more interesting than "vote up".