So the idea behind this is that once a year or whatever there would be a ballot (secret of course) that decides which mods retain their mod status and which ones get the chop.

So many mods and more people applying every day there's got to be redundancies and this would be a good fair way to separate the wheat from the chaff.  This would have the added benefit of encouraging mods and people wanting to be mods to be cool to the community and not get too big for their britches (figuratively).