Public votes do absolutely nothing to stop people from making a bunch of users on a bunch of instances and voting from those users. Voting agents are a simple solution to the issue, since you can still just ban the voting agent if it seems problematic.

But there's a deeper context here, which is we are drawing a weird line between voting being a fundamental, if not critical part of the application, but also apparently grounds for imposing sanctions on users for doing it wrong? That's a fundamentally flawed mechanic no matter how you swing it, since you can't standardize any singular set of rules, and we are already seeing a rapid escalation of tit for tat vote bans. This is just unsustainable and is pushing things towards an obvious endpoint where there is such a chilling effect on voting that it negates the entire utility of the mechanic for sorting and content curation.