Things like Prestige voting in particular would be good.
I disagree. A system that rewards people who play BM the longest is just going to alienate new players and reward those who just do lots of battles... not necessarily anything else... how boring.
Prestige by itself does not guarantee "long term player". I have characters that are nowhere near the top of the list in prestige, simply because the characters themselves are newer. And there are plenty of short-term players who gain prestige quickly, due to being active in wars. Given how easy it is to gain prestige into the mid 20's, and how hard it is to get much past the low 40's, prestige is actually one of the few things in the game where older families don't have much, if any, advantage over new families. (Assuming that you discount the really old characters who gained craptons of prestige under the old prestige rules.) And prestige voting would also make unique items much more valuable. A few mid-prestige characters who make a concerted effort to gain several unique items to influence an election could easily outvote and oust some of those old farts. Overall, I think prestige voting would contribute to
removing the entrenched old timer phenomenon.
And what's wrong with characters who are in lots of battles? Isn't that what this game is about? Isn't the lack of battles one of the things that quite a few forum users are lamenting as the cause of the player-base decline? I say we should be *rewarding* players who's characters engage in lots of battles. And if that means giving them more voting power, so they get into power, and reward us with more battles, then so be it.
Down with the pacifists! 
I like Chenier's idea about voting based on unit size, that would be quite cool ...
Yeah, because a "100-man infantry unit" just screams "new player" a lot louder than "old family with rich duke", right?
