Adding my answer, because it elaborates the idea that you can SELECT multiple columns from the table from which you subquery.
Here I needed the the most recently cast cote and it's associated information.
I first tried simply to SELECT the max(votedate) along with vote, itemid, userid etc., but while the query would return the max votedate, it would also return the a random row for the other information. Hard to see among a bunch of 1s and 0s.
This worked well:
$query = "
SELECT t1.itemid, t1.itemtext, t2.vote, t2.votedate, t2.userid
FROM
(
SELECT itemid, itemtext FROM oc_item ) t1
LEFT JOIN
(
SELECT vote, votedate, itemid,userid FROM oc_votes
WHERE votedate IN
(select max(votedate) FROM oc_votes group by itemid)
AND userid=:userid) t2
ON (t1.itemid = t2.itemid)
order by itemid ASC
";
The subquery in the WHERE clause WHERE votedate IN (select max(votedate) FROM oc_votes group by itemid) returns one record - the record with the max vote date.