Sql-server – How is ORDER BY logically Processed

Unless I'm grossly misunderstanding your structure, a simple join should work fine:

SELECT stories.vid, body, timestamp, COUNT(votes.id) votecnt FROM stories
INNER JOIN votes ON stories.vid=votes.vid
WHERE stories.lv=1 AND stories.status=1
GROUP BY votes.vid
ORDER BY votecnt DESC

I'm not sure what you mean by

It would be even better, if the first query would sort the table by status = 1 count at first, and then total votes.

since your where statement only uses votes/stories that have status=1.

If an alias is used in an ORDER BY it must be used on its own, not inside an expression.

If inside any kind of expression it tries to resolve it to a column in the base table sources not as an alias.

So for example

SELECT A AS B
FROM   (VALUES (1, 3),
               (2, 2),
               (3, 1)) V(A, B)
ORDER  BY B

Returns (ordered by alias)

+---+
| B |
+---+
| 1 |
| 2 |
| 3 |
+---+

But

SELECT A AS B
FROM   (VALUES (1, 3),
               (2, 2),
               (3, 1)) V(A, B)
ORDER  BY B + 0 

Returns (Ordered by base table column B)

+---+
| B |
+---+
| 3 |
| 2 |
| 1 |
+---+

You can of course just wrap the whole thing in a derived table or CTE.

WITH T AS
(
SELECT 1 AS foo, 2 AS bar
UNION ALL
SELECT 10 AS foo, 20 AS bar
)
SELECT *
FROM T
ORDER BY CASE WHEN foo = 1 THEN bar END;