Vote counts and breakdowns are very useful on answers. On SE (until I found the right userscript) it bothered me that I couldn’t see this to know whether an answer I was considering following was controversial or community consensus. A score of 10 means very different things if that’s +10/-0 vs. +25/-15. The latter should give me pause.
But maybe that’s not so important for questions.
Votes on questions serve two audiences: the OP, who’s trying to get an answer, and everybody else – the people providing answers today, the people who’ll find that page in a year via Google, and the people looking for the best content from the site. For the OP, votes convey important information about how the question is being received. I’ve been thinking that if we don’t show votes we need some way to communicate, at least broadly, that the community has issues with this question – but maybe that’s not correct? If people leave helpful comments then the comments tell you what you need to fix; if people downvote but nobody comments, what can the OP do with that feedback?
That’s the OP case, but there’s also everybody else. Voting on questions is useful – for granting privileges, for weighting search results, for feeling good about a well-asked question (for the OP), and probably other things too. We do want to show it sometimes.
I don’t know how to reconcile those concerns. I’ve always preferred more information to less information, but users have varying feelings about this.