The traditional reason why mods need to have higher vp is to help close battles.
For example, when someone has been found voting for themselves with a multi account, the latest policy is to remove all votes for that person and assign an auto-win to their opponent---all votes except the one from the actual multi-account.
The reason why we (I'll use "we" even though I'm not currently staff) don't remove the vote from the multi-account is so it remains in the system when a mod checks for multiple accounts and self-voting on a user's page. If the vote is removed, which seems the obvious thing to do, evidence is also erased from that log.
If it happens to be a low vote battle, one with only 2 or 3 votes, for example, and the multi-account vote is the only one left and is going for the offender, a mod's vote has to outweigh the multi-account's vp in order to help the battle close faster. The system will not close a battle that has equal vp count and it usually will not close a battle that has less than 3 votes. But if a battle is already older than 3 days, even with just two votes and as long as there is more vp on one side than the other, it can be re-ranked and closed.
With that being said, there is no reason why we can't lower mod vp to be the same as everyone else's and simply have more than one mod show up to vote on an auto-win battle to close the battle....or even to get other users to come vote. However, that sometimes works better in theory than in practice. A lot of mods are very inactive, especially when it comes to voting....So getting them to vote might be a monumental task. I don't agree that there's not enough activity for the staff. Voting itself is an activity, and votes are always needed.
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