to clarify, if all goes according to plan, we're experiencing a temporary feature freeze while we wait to transition from SE 1.0 to SE 2.0. After that, things like this become plausible again. On the other hand, it will still be the case that we're asking other people to make such modifications for us, and I'd prefer to have the prioritize more important feature requests for us.

Seriously though, it's pretty lame. In retrospect, I should have made a separate account for the election thread, but I realized that only after the election was in full swing. I got in touch with the SE team; there should be no difficulties in removing all the badges I will have acquired from the election thread. I'll have to delete the question to prevent the badges from being regenerated, but presumably there aren't any objections to that. I'll post a copy of the thread here on meta in case anybody really wants to look at it later (at least the question, answers, and vote counts ... maybe not all the comments).