witness votes are stake-weighted. It's really the top level reason for stake at all, since this is a DPOS - Distributed Proof of Stake based blockchain, all governance matters are decided by the top 20 witnesses, who achieve that position by being voted there by accumulating the most cumulative, added up people's stake in the form of their staked votes.
You can sort of see how this works out by looking at the data on this page, and seeing who votes for who and how much stake they have total supporting the witness and how much stake support the witness has in total.
This is why its CRITICAL for the minnows to vote enmasse as cumulatively their voices add up and matter.
A million and one 1hp minnows can overvote the single whale with 1 million hp by being 1hp higher in total voting power together, that 1 hp makes the difference.
You can also search for more about how witnesses and votes work on hiversearcher.com
Awesome, thanks for the explanation! To my alternate accounts I go...
I turned your question into a post here:
https://peakd.com/hive/@sircork/minnow-votes-matter-response-to-a-question-i-received-about-witness-voting-power