Hey Nachmore, that's actually a really good question.
To help break it down I'll do the quick and easy Ken brings you Connect!
Any feedback that is submitted by anyone into Connect has two options for other people to comment on it.
Vote & Validation.
Validation is really just that, you are validating that you are encountering the same problem, most people use it for bug type feedback not suggestions. This helps us to determine how many people are hitting a particular bug. If we see a lot of validations and duplicate bug reports it definitely gets a lot more visibility by the team on what priority it should be in the fix list. (That's not to say that bugs with very low validation/duplicate reports don't get looked at!)
Voting is how important this bug or suggestion is to you. Each person has their own idea on what is important to them. What I may want may not be exactly what you want or what Ben wants. The star rating (1 through 5) is for you to tell us what you think of a suggestion or bug and how important it is to you. Sometimes we think, "Hey this is pretty important! Customers must want this because we think it's a super cool idea!" And we find out that no, most of you want something else entirely. By Voting it helps us to determine what new features to implement first in future releases. Not all will make it in, and some may take longer to add then others, but trust me on this one, your voice on the votes really helps us out!
So in a nutshell,
Validation == I can reproduce this problem too!
Vote == This is how important this bug or suggestion is to me!
Hope that helps clear things up for everyone.
-Ken
