Although early fundraising could be correlational with success rather than causal, if it’s an indicator of who can generate support from the electorate.
(I’d be pretty confident there’s an effect like this but don’t know how strong, and haven’t tried to understand if the article you’re quoting from tries to correct for it.)
Using votes to push towards the score we think it should be at sounds worse than just individually voting according to some thresholds of how good/helpful/whatever a post needs to be? I’m worried about zero sum (so really negative sum because of the effort) attempts to move karma around where different people are pushing in different ways, where it’s hard to know how to interpret the results, compared to people straightforwardly voting without regard to others’ votes.
At least, if we should be voting to push things towards our best guess I think the karma system should be reformed to something that plays nice with that—e.g. each individual gives their preferred score, and the displayed karma is the median.