I think you should pretty much ignore voting in contentious political threads. People have it in their heads that the "side" with the most upvotes "wins", so people are reading comments to determine sides and then to vote appropriately.

All I can say is that people are going to be super upset when they go to cash in their HN karma and find that it isn't honored as legal tender ;)

I'm just happy HN is such a fringe community not representative of the general population. It's pretty sad when you reach a point where you make medical decisions to "own" the "other team".