I have definitely seen the anti-patterns you mention when doing dot voting.

However, I would say that a lot of this comes from when people take dot voting as the end all. It should only be a quick way to get a possible prioritization of concepts rather than THE prioritization of concepts.

This is a common anti-pattern I have seen for product managers that are using prioritization methodologies (pick any one). You should only use these methods as a starting point. Then whoever has the decision making authority to decide prioritization adjusts it based on what they think is best. Any prioritization methodology will miss the nuance that a person brings to the table (same reason why AI doesn’t deal with anomalies well).

This is similar to the feeling that people need to keep all of the concepts (aka post-it notes) that have been created in a session. At most, they are idea manure to grow the next set of ideas and build context. At worst, they will box you into something that doesn’t fit in the future.

PS: I used to work for Philosophie that built a great tool for dot voting called dotvotingapp.com (oddly enough) that has private ideation and voting to combat the priming problem you describe.