The way we pick winners is not perfect, but it has been working pretty well up to this point. Rather than impose our own subjective views, we prefer to let the community decide who should win.
We do not resteem winning posts because it doesn't fit in with the theme of our blog. Many people find resteems to be spammy, especially if they are about topics that are of no interest to someone scrolling through their feed to see what's new. We believe our followers are naturally interested in Steemvoter, and so that is the topic we keep our blog focused on. From time to time we do resteem high quality posts that are directly related to Steemvoter.
Payouts from our posts are used for several things: powering up the @steemvoter account for our own voting, paying business expenses, and paying the salaries of our employees.