This is a valid concern, but I see little incentive to create twinks just for the purpose of voting for a specific local boards. I'm 100% with you that votes from more established members should be more important. Perhaps it would make sense to do background checks on all the voters once the poll gets enough traction? If votes were placed with twinks, I guess it should become quite obvious when looking at the posting history. I wouldn't ignore newbie votes completely though, I feel they should have a voice as well, and that it could benefit everyone. We've seen a large influx of new users in the past couple of years because of mainstream media's interest in Bitcoin. Newbs are the loudest complainers when it comes to getting merit. They are often ostracized because of their bad English & shitposting (and in 99,9% of cases, rightly so). Let them do all the complaining & shitposting in their local boards (hell, I would even suggest restricting some members' access stricly to their local boards) and let us enjoy cleaner and more comprehensible English sections of the forum!

Merit sources upvoting certain boards is one angle. Call me paranoid, but whoever would post the suggestion in the thread could simply buy merit and manipulate the vote this way. Unless, as you suggested earlier, these would be posted by a bot (which is a far better idea, but it still doesn't include the newbies, and as I explained above, I think it's important to let them have a vote as well).