Are there really folks who vote for what time code should be the "standard"?
SMPTE and other forms of time code such as MTC, word clock, 'black-burst', etc. have been around longer than we probably have a right to question as which should be standards. SMPTE, for ex., stands for Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers, so it really is a group of engineers from 2 different entertainment groups, film and TV. They saw a need for standardized timing because film is 24 or 25 frames per second (fps), video is 29.97 fps, while audio is typically at 30 fps - try to sync that!
Each discipline developed it's own timing system. The 30 fps standard was derived from early black and white TV and since audio was synced to that, it kinda took. The advent of color TV saw the need to put in timing references that would be sort of adaptable to the B&W technology at the time so (to make a long story short) the 29.97 fps standard emerged. Film has always been at 24 fps (US) or 25 fps (EU). And then there's Japan, but let's not go there for now.
The 2 disciplines of film and TV had a clash of sorts when it became uhh... time to transfer movies to television. The difference in frame rates meant you can't do a frame-for-frame transfer. Since audio was also embedded in the movie's frames, that meant audio would be distorted in the transfer as well. Not only that, audio was often recorded to a separate tape recorder while filming a movie. The resulting frame rate difference would mean that audio would slowly lag behind the video as the movie progresses - kinda like those pirated dvds.
To make a long story short, everyone just got together and decided that in order for everything to line up, they had to come up with a common timing reference, hence SMPTE was born. Tsaka na natin pagusapan ang MTC and LTC and black burst, ha?
