Total number of votes is too coarse a metric, it can't distinguish between a slow burn that affects a few users over a long period and a fast burn that affects many users in a short period. You also can't tell if the urgency surrounding an issue has decreased (a sign that it might no longer be relevant, for example a request to integrate with a product people are no longer using).

Adding the ability to filter votes by the time the vote was cast (via the changed operator, for example) would let you answer really interesting questions like "What issues have people voted for in the last day/week/month"?

This would be most useful if there were also a means of filtering by the number of votes, as in "Show me all the issues that have more than X votes in the last Y days". With that information, you could set filters to keep you up to the minute on issues that are becoming more popular.