Q:

Flaws in the voting model in re. questions

This issue has been addressed scores of times. How can we improve our voting system? touches on some of the concerns which were exemplified today in two ELL questions (votes at the moment of this writing are in parens):

The ambiguous "he is buried" (4)
When a girl mentions her girlfriend, does she mean it like lesbian girlfriend? (20)

The voting model serves SE very well, it seems to me, in most of the areas of interest served by its sites. In the case of ELL, though, our objective is supposed to be the creation of a database of useful Q's and A's on English, with the emphasis on material which benefits EFL students. It is surely helpful to a learner to understand that "girlfriend" does not always mean "lover", but it seems to me that an interesting question about voice and the copula is of wider use and benefit to such a student than a mildly provocative discussion of the reluctance of men to refer to their male friends as "boyfriend." (Not to mention that the male repressed homosexuality evidenced by this reluctance is a better fit for cogsci.stackexchange.com than for ELL!)
As was pointed out in commentary, the second question above certainly has value to a learner, but its high popularity put me in mind of previous (and better) examples. The point here is not just the high vote count for the second, but the disparity between the two vote counts.
Isn't there anything we can do to prevent the occasional elevation of questions whose popularity is based as much on their subject matter as on their value to the learner? For instance, can we provide moderators with some form of "enhanced up/down vote" which could be applied judiciously in such cases?
(That is a seat-of-the-pants idea and may not pass muster, but this seems to me an important and obvious flaw in the "popularity" model that we could well consider addressing.)

A:

Isn't there anything we can do to prevent the occasional elevation of questions whose popularity is based as much on their subject matter as on their value to the learner? For instance, can we provide moderators with some form of "enhanced up/down vote" which could be applied judiciously in such cases?

As a practical matter, no, there isn’t anything ELL can do along these lines. That kind of change would have to be applied to the entire Stack Exchange network—and I can assure you that there are other SE sites would not welcome that change, no matter how much ELL thought it was a good idea. 
Moreover, it’s not at all in keeping with the voting model that Stack Exchange is built upon, and doesn’t mesh with the SE Theory of Moderation. Voting is a matter of prime importance on Stack Exchange, and is ultimately the most important way in which Stack Exchange sites are community-run. The job of moderators is primarily exception handling, either by handling flags or by raising community discussions on subjects that might not be apparent to those who aren’t following questions the way moderators do.
Which is why the moderators aren’t in any way empowered to influence voting above and beyond their status as community members. The final privilege with respect to voting, the downvote, is received at 125 reputation—every member with that much reputation is intended to have equal voice in the voting process. In fact, moderators cannot even see who voted or how (barring the semi-automated systems that may bring suspected sock puppets or other voting abuses to moderator attention).

A:

Things that factor in to my up-votes:

Was this question or answer useful and/or interesting to me? 
Was it easy to understand and read? 
Can I imagine this question being helpful to other visitors to the site? 
Is the author engaged with their post? Are they refining their post and taking feedback into account? I always up-vote that when I see it, because it's behavior I want to encourage.
Did the author put a lot of effort and detail into their question? I also up-vote that because I want to encourage it. 

Nowhere in that list do I think about whether this question as valuable as other questions I've up-voted, or more valuable than questions I didn't up-vote, or how my vote will change the score of this question relative to other questions on the site.
I don't want to disparage the "He is buried" question. I think it is a good quality question, but the language is far more advanced than most of the questions on ELL. If you look at the list of top scored questions our highest voted questions are not about sex (but there is one about a female friend that is not a girlfriend) so I don't really think 'lesbian' in the title mattered all that much. Other than StoneyB's canonical post on the perfect, the most popular questions are mostly focused on meaning and practical usage. 
The "does girlfriend always mean romantic girlfriend" question is easier to read and deals with a practical conversation problem that many folks have already encountered (or can imagine they might encounter). It doesn't surprise me that more of our community is interested in/finds more value in understanding something said in a conversation over understanding the nuance in a written phrase. 
We don't know where the "final" score of these two questions are going to end up. Maybe the girlfriend question stays at 25 after its initial burst of popularity and the 'is buried' question turns out to be more interesting to people over time. Regardless, score doesn't measure inherent value, which is really a philosophy question. 
Value is relative to the person assessing it and their current situation. Someone trying to understand the Richard III: Does it matter where he is buried? article will value the "He is buried" question, and someone who has a peer that uses "girlfriend" ambiguously would value the other question. The assessment of value will probably change the day after they cast their vote when their context changes. 
Popularity gets a question more attention and if it has mass appeal the votes can pile on rather quickly. Not much you can do about that except maybe doing some more aggressive rate-limiting on the hot network questions after they've gotten a certain amount of attention. Neither of the examples in your question has any more inherent value over the other though, and raw score without normalization across a correlated group can't really measure much more than popularity. 
I don't see this as a problem with the voting system. I think that it's a statistics problem. Everyone assigns numbers more meaning than they actually have. If you want to solve it, SE should stop displaying a number and just show a color gradient (and then watch the flood of questions asking "How much better is 'puce' than 'lilac'?" roll in). 

