During the nomination phase, members of the community can comment on the nomination statements for each candidate. This can provide valuable information about how the community regards these candidates, as well as specific positive and negative points that go beyond the metrics displayed. There is some noise, but I think the useful information significantly outweighs that.
However, these comments are only displayed by default during the nomination phase (the only way to show them is by clicking the "nomination" button which almost no one will know how to do). Many voters only participate in the primaries or final election voting, and thus don't see the comments that were left. I had to explain to someone earlier how to go back to the nomination stage to see these comments, and they seemed confused by this.
Most voters aren't going to bother to click to another page or hunt for additional information about the candidates. They are going to look at the information that's right there in the nomination statement and its general vicinity. Even if they did read the comments from days before, they might have forgotten about them by the time actual voting comes around.
I therefore think that it would be very helpful for voters to have comments on the nomination statements during both voting stages. I know that we're concerned about making these pages too long (as they had been in the past), so we could more aggressively collapse the comments (show only the top X comments by default) with the ability to expand the comment thread like normal. I don't think this would make the voting page significantly less readable.
I know it's too late to do anything about the current Stack Overflow election, but I think this could be of help for future SE elections.
