<human>: There seems to be a growing amount of spamming and cheating on Reddit these days. There also seem to be a several confusing and heavily criticized attempts to mitigate these problems, such as banning domains and fuzzing the vote counts. In my opinion, these only serve to treat the symptoms of the problem.

The root of the problem is artificial voting. Generally this entails mass upvoting to promote a link, or mass downvoting to censor certain views. In most (if not all) of the cases I've read about, this artificial voting is done by accounts controlled by bots.

**Thus, it seems that a simple, elegant fix would be to remove the vote function from the API.**

After all, shouldn't it only be real users, not bots that are voting? What is democracy if there are individuals who can automatically cast as many votes as they care to?

Granted, this won't completely eradicate the problem. An individual could still manually vote on each of his many accounts. But the worst of the problem, the most egregious offenses, will be eliminated.

Could you distill the essence of the text into 1-3 sentences?
<bot>: Remove the ability to artificially and automatically vote via the API, and you remove the problem of individuals artificially and automatically voting.