Jimmy-
In order to make it convenient for people to follow the kind of process that you describe, would you advocate some minor software changes, i.e. a simple button-click for people to nominate things to the 'candidates' page?
More or less. Whatever software scheme is used should be reasonably generic to be applicable to similar situations. For example, Votes for deletion, Votes for undeletion and Requests for adminship are all pages that work according to the same "express dissent within given timeframe or [x] happens" model. It would be most useful to have some generic voting queue module instead of a hack that is adjusted specifically to the sifting process.
Regards,
Erik