A great post! This is something that had been on my mind for a bit.
One sure way to keep the voting process fresh is to put terms on the votes, themselves. Meaning that a cast vote will expire after some period of time. That way one's support will not drop off to nothing in one day yet they will have to reach out to supporters whose vote is coming due. The witness page could remember who you had been voting for with the expired votes to make it easy to re-vote the same witnesses.
Users could receive some kind of notice when votes are about to expire... or have a setting they could toggle off such notification in Settings.
Currently we have less than 25 percent of the platform voting for witnesses as a whole body. Causing these votes to have to endlessly be recast for the same people solves nothing and creates new issues. That's a non-starter and always will be.
However, expiring votes on dead witnesses after a very reasonable 90 days should be under heavy consideration for inclusion, because that has significant impacts to proper witness positioning and vote distribution right away.
Love this idea! I hope it will be included in the discussions towards a chosen solution. However with the existing low levels of voting participation, perhaps the wall is getting users to even vote in the first place? Let alone continue to renew their expired votes. Perhaps as well as a toggle for notification we could implement auto-renew also? Interesting.
Yes any project to raise users' awareness to witness voting has my support.
I made some posts offering a proposal for witness vote decay back in October - but despite @ned saying he liked it, I haven't heard any more:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@ura-soul/enhancing-steem-s-proof-of-stake-model-through-expiry-renewal-of-witness-votes-based-on-account-activity-levels-revised-based-on