The types of votes you are talking about (political and governance type votes) are quite different where there are generally only a small number of choices. When searching a sea of content, whether that is Steemit or Facebook or google, the task requires significant resources, which means it is always going to be paid in some manner. Reddit is somewhat of a counterexample, where most first-level curation is done by uncompensated users, but even there the front page is curated (and the entire site is moderated) which means Reddit (the company) is paying people to vote.