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Steam is good, but it could be better. Polling offers something better to Steam.
Forum is a categorical name, and if that name encapsulates the feature of voting, I say we add voting to Steam's forums -and if forum does not, though that would be a narrow denotation only befitting for an ornery few arguers, then simply change the name or ignore the name. It is the features that matter, not the name.
No doubt many worry of hivemind mentality -that voting will, lead to the destruction of free thought on Steam's forums. Speaking, drowns out other thoughts in itself. Conveying an opinion, pressures others to change their own or react to it, in itself. A number on a screen, by contrast, offers less pressure. If anything, your opinion would only be pressured to give an educated reaction to how you think others are thinking based on the voting done. Dictating opinions until others agree or go silent seems a far more useful mechanism for hivemind mentality than a plain vote on a screen educating others where people feel they are.
Of course, rules and guidelines exist. Luckily, this subforum allows us to suggest changes to the rules and guidelines and policies of Steam. I leave it to the developers to amend their rules as best they see fit if they ever actually adopt this idea, but if you have trouble figuring out the wording, feel free to add "Polling is allowed on Steam via the polling features provided." to the rules as a placeholder until whatever fancy necessary lingo is added.
Another "I want" thread, yes? I DO, want this feature, and a vocal few users are offended features are suggested in Steam's suggestion forums that are only wanted by the OP. Thus, I am glad to have the support of this minority of users, as they would certainly want me better educated on the opinions of Steam users at large. What better way is there to learn the opinions of Steam users, than offering polling in all threads I can quickly look at to see where opinions lie, as opposed to requiring I skim through vast troves of threads just to convey an opinion? 
It is certainly more practical and reasonable an expectation to have to look at, or just tell me the polling numbers for a given thought. You could just shut me down or drain a little wind from my sails with a simple number from a poll, if polling existed. But you can't, and that is probably annoying and inconvenient. I am a bug, in other words, but this is the solution to me. That all being said: I bet cars were offensive when first suggested during a time of horses, until the cars were built. Perhaps we should not be so offended by unpopular suggestions not built of premade Steam-user-consensus, either, should this feature be implemented.
Bots and alts and those who wish to manipulate others, of course can lie and abuse polling, like how one can already lie and manipulate others in the forums. Bots can also type based on scripts, in our forums, join our games, and probably burn our wives and bang our crops if we wait another couple decades. So yes this is an issue, just as it is an issue across all aspects of Steam as a service. Developers are free to implement features over time to combat this issue in any aspect of Steam, which is a root issue that requires some more fundamental solutions than a polling security system can likely cover. 
Though, unless we are suggesting TF2, a lot of online Steam games, the Steam marketplace, the Steam forums, and Steam accounts should never have been made -feel free to argue for this if you want to- I believe it would be unfair to say voting feature should thus be kept nonexistent despite those other features infested with bots. Perhaps the user-chosen Steam awards should also be nullified if voting is altogether untrustworthy.
Priority can be given to so many things, probably some better than this feature, probably some that are not. Developers no doubt work hard on the coding for any feature of this premium thoroughly fleshed out service. The Steam forums are a prime draw of the Steam service, as are the launcher options, the group and user chat options, and the store, and the micro-economy feature. I do not claim this is the most important feature Steam could make: I do claim this feature is the most important feature for figuring out what the most important features in the opinion of users, is. 
Anyone can claim to know what consensus on Steam is or what the most popular feature request is, but proper polling would better prove that more than merely a guesstimation of how many people felt the urge to post about it and how they overall felt. Thus, this is a rather fundamental feature useful for understanding the perceived value of all future features, in the eyes of users. Steam developers can of course ignore our opinions, but if Steam devs want to know our consensus on certain things accurately, polling would aid them in that venture with a number to look at as frame of reference.
If I suggested Steam should be made in the first place in a hypothetical user forum about the Valve gaming company prior to Steam's existence, I would have been laughed right off it. I thus suggest to the developers we have a polling feature. Developers, you are free to laugh at my feature if it is too much of a workload. Only you the developers can best understand how difficult and bang-per-second this workload would be for your efforts. While we the users can speculate and there is of course no harm in doing so, ultimately you developers have to make the call on what is reasonable based on your current setup.
Developers can do their own polling and polls could be linked to off-site polling sites. This leads to inconsistent poll formats that vary greatly in quality due to said consistency issues. Having everything baked into Steam's platform, from the game library to the forums to the Discord-like group chats, has been standard quality control for some time. If we are operating on a developer philosophy of baking all practically codable features into Steam in order to prevent quality control issues and maintaining independence from relying on other programs, logic would dictate polling should not be made an exception. Of course, I do not pretend to know what the logic is for why Steam bakes so much into itself, and merely try to discern a reasoning why. 
If nothing else, it is plain inconvenient and discourages polling to force off-site linking instead of having a button right there next to the thread-post button. IGN even offers fairly good polling features in thread OPs.
Threads can also generate spam, but the forums are still more than useful and enjoyable as-is. Just as someone could spam topics about cats, or spam threads on selling keys, or spam swears in the forums, or spam walls of emoticons, threads that exclusively focus on polling rather than just happen to have a poll included in relation to the topic, could also be spammed. What is and is not considered spam in this case can be defined by the developers in updated rules and guidelines, if deemed necessary. Otherwise, this is not much more a threat of spam than anything else in the forums.
If people want to make money on Steam or get a thread pumped to the top, they can already bribe people to bump/post in their thread. Maybe polling would add to this, but chances are it would be similar odds of someone trying to bribe a vote as it is for someone to bribe a positive post in a thread. Rules for or against bribing for votes in polls should be up to the devs. In my opinion, any explicit bribing such as involving gaining friends, money, points, or items should be banned in the case of polling. 
Chances are most users would not try this as they would just quickly get reported because no one wants their thread locked due to derailers just like no one wants their thread locked due to bribers. Even if the bribe is a direct message, that too risks getting reported so most potential bribers would at least think twice. There will always be people who abuse a good thing, but I believe the moderator load of issues here would be about the same as any other issue in the forums and thus should not preclude polling.
Steam Greenlight failed for a few reasons that sort of correlate with potential abuses of polling, the first and most obvious was developers gaming it. Developers would offer rewards or bribes for voting for their game. This turned what could be described as a non-partisan system, into a pseudo-partisan system by devs acting like their own political party promoting you the 'voter' vote for their game via giving you things for doing so and promising things, and campaigning. While I view Steam Greenlight as a good-hearted and necessary educational experiment of Steam's, it was ultimately a failed experiment.
Other issues include votes on good ideas getting buried under votes on bad ones, Valve without correlation picking games regardless of the amount of support, feeling cheated when you pay money to put up a game that might not be approved, and most prominently, most developers had no idea why their game was even approved.
Single choice, multiple choice, ranking (not to be confused with ranked-choice voting), and ranked-choice voting, would be useful voting systems depending on the use case and desires of the OP of the thread. This helps us talk to each other, it helps us understand each other. Polling encourages passive users who have no intention of making a post, to instead click a button rather than commit to a full post, thus leading to more users communicating some degree of information than they otherwise would have if posting a comment was the only option.
Each voting system has its use case and merits, complete with varied scenarios and questions they can be adapted to. What is your favorite color? What is your favorite Steam feature? What is the best anime? What should my next game have next coded in? Whether it is improving user-user understanding, user-mod understanding, group understanding, game understanding, and more, polling has a benefit to offer in any given area. 
This is by no means some utopian solution to creating a Forum 2.0, but this would offer real referenceable numbers for any topic questioned, useful similar to how numbers from Valve in relation to hardware polling are useful, but with a use case expanded to everything, not just hardware.
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Mark that as the answer.
So, no "improvement", just more ways to annoy people, meme around, and all kinds of tomfoolery.
I am not opposing polls directly. But I do say, you're kidding yourself if you think they'd be an "improvement".
Also
Here is that statement, in case that scroll is too difficult:
[End]
Maybe the "absurd length" of my post took too much wind out of the sails of people's logical faculties when "it will never happen" or "no" are the most prevalent response, as opposed to actual refutations of anything I said, among the current vocal minority. Restating a mentioned issue that was already addressed is not an argument. Joke suggestions are not a real thread contribution.
In keeping with forum ethics, not to be confused with forum rules, please offer the bare minimum effort of directly addressing at least 1 real point in the OP instead of generic thumbs up or down; not for my sake, but for sake of being taken seriously by people who care about logic and educated discussion. Reading the the title and then responding is not a good strategy, either; everything was sectioned properly the post while long is more than reasonably navigable.