Welcome! The price of Steem is dropping for a few reasons. For one its highly inflationary because of all the Steem created to reward content, curators, and witnesses/miners.

Another reason is a lot of whales powering down to help redistribute the wealth.

There is no contigency plan I'm aware of, but Steem Power helps protect you some as it increases the amount of Steem you have.

If everyones vote was worth the same it'd be easy to game the system and create hundreds of accounts to vote on your own stuff so I think thats why votes are not made equal.