Is the election first past the post, or preferential?
All 30 notaries still get ~1500 KMD per month, and obviously the best payout will be for notary 30. who divides his profit only for 0.5% of KMD, whereas position 1. shares his profit with a much bigger VOTER base of 6.50%.
It isn't preferential. You get 1 VOTE per 1 KMD that you control the keys to, you send these VOTE tokens to one notary candidate address in each region.
regarding the statement "All 30 notaries still get ~1500 KMD" :
This is false, notary mining is dependent on several things. If the operator is inattentive the node will go down and you will get 0 KMD for how ever long the node is down. I check on network health at least weekly, often there are nodes that are offline.
You will do better backing a dedicated operator who is focused on maximizing uptime, and server located at a reliable FAST connection.
But in a perfect world with perfect NN operators, you are right, pick the node with the least amount of votes and get a bigger slice of the pie.