As far as I can determine, the entire voting system is inherently flawed. The final stage is publicly biased with mods spamming info. (You know who you are.) The previous stages are going to be flawed as well, as it is more or less the same thing with the nominating. People nominating their buddies and so forth.
As kenny was saying, a entire rework of the system might be necessary, however a community based veteran isn't the way to solve it. Lets face it, the server isn't setup to be very good at community events like pvp tournaments. With it being vanilla, there aren't many plugins and such to make this happen.
The next issue we have is the citizen rank. A rank that is relatively meaningless. On a scale it goes from Default -> RSD -> CTZ -> Donor -> vet and so forth.
The citizen rank is a manually promoted rank that is obtained after 52 weeks of activity. Not all in a row mind you, it can be done over two years. However many many citizens don't do much so this rank can't have people expected to do it due to being granted by time.
I personally don't have a solution for this, but these are just some problems to think about.