I'll tackle the general point first, then give my view on the specific area that gave rise to this question.
It's important to note that meta is not particularly well set up for formalised votes. As such, selection of moderators in an election does not use the meta system but rather a dedicated election set up.
In general, votes in meta are indicative and suggest a consensus on behaviour. Thus at best they tend to indicate an overall 'strength of feeling'. Where there is a strong feeling in one direction, this should be taken as a guide to behaviour, but cannot be seen as a hard line. This is by far the biggest category of meta questions: we get asked about some behavioural aspect and hope to come to a consensus. Notably, almost all of these 'decisions' are about how the community as a whole acts: thus in the end, each reader may make there own judgement on what the 'outcome' is.
The one place we have had reasonably clear meta 'voting' is when selecting representatives for TUG. Based on having some years of experience, those have been run using a two-step process in which the timeframe and meaning of votes has been extremely clear. However, that can only happen if the question is posed in advance with the knowledge of how it needs to work.
The specific question that prompted this one is Do we need more moderators?. There, the questions was 'do we need more mods' and I asked for some guideline on what would constitute a 'yes'. The reason is that a request for a new moderator election needs to come from the existing mod team (at least, that is the mechanism that is most common). Asking for a number of votes was not meant to imply a simple 'vote for this and it happens' mentality, but rather to give the existing moderators some idea of the level of feeling.
At present, the answers to that question do not strongly suggest that the community as a whole has a fixed view. At the same time, a decision to ask for an election would not itself be a major issue. Most of the network sites have more than three moderators (we had five during beta). A decision to ask for an election would give the community (those eligible to vote) ample opportunity to talk to the candidates and go through the much ore formal voting procedures that are set up. As such, to me it does not feel like a formal 'pre-election' is needed here.