Views sort criteria: points vote result (sum) Disappeared???

This issue is I think caused by a fundamental design error in the votingapi views integration. The options for views tables are all generated using a query on the tables used to store the votes, which is just plain wrong for a number of reasons, not least performance - the default query has to scan the entire table to return a result. It also means that you cannot create views using votingapi until you have some votes stored.

I can see that the author thought this would make the views settings flexible and extensible, but what would be better, I think, would be to use options to allow the views fields etc to be parameterised.

I don't have a patch right now but in the short term I may rewrite the _votingapi_views_values() function to return a hard-coded set of values for each combination of arguments.

Further to my previous comment, there are some default values when the tables are empty but they don't include points, only percent, which is I think the root of your problem.

Support for the 5.x branch of VotingAPI has ended with the release of Drupal 7 and the upcoming release of VotingAPI 7.x-2.4.