You're conflating two fundamentally different kinds of forks. The ones activated through voting were soft forks, where old nodes still accepted all blocks mined by the new ones, and the voting was to ensure that enough miners would enforce the new rules to overtake any chains created by the old nodes and bring everyone back onto the same chain - that is, it was necessary to ensure there wasn't a permanent fork. This simply doesn't apply to hard forks because by definition, the old nodes will not accept the newer fork no matter how long it grows. Calling it "voting" is kind of a misnomer - it's a purely technical measure to make sure soft forks don't break Bitcoin when they activate.