It is a vote. Gavin just called for an election. People need to stop freaking out. It isn't over throwing the ways or a revolution. Right now XT has about 10% of the node votes and 0% of miner votes.
http://xtnodes.com/index.phpBut per the whole vote thing, really, it is kind of silly and bitcoin is broken. There are only 20 people in all of bitcoin that matter. Those are the 20 admins of the 20 biggest pools. Together they control more than 95% of the bitcoin hash. And technically Gavin only needs 75% of the vote, which is actually only the top 6 guys he needs to convince.
https://blockchain.info/poolsIt is a vote and it is an election, but really only among 20 delegates that are being supported by their constituencies of miners.
I would call it a divorce, since the winner are not able to prevent the other chain from grow, while in an election, the loser must follow the lead of winner
At first, the winner vs loser would look like bitcoin vs litecoin, however, since both chains have same algorithm, miners are free to switch between these two different chains: When A chain is not profitable, they will go to B chain, thus make B chain stronger, thus B chain regain popularity if someone is pumping up the price of B chain. This kind of situation will drag along for many years to come
Vote is not a way to solve the problem in a decentralized system