It is, but winning those votes usually takes some reasonable amount of effort and talent.
I guess a justification for leaving it as it is, and not preventing it in the consensus code, is that it gives the talentless, lazy people an opportunity. I just don't think this is sending the right message to the world-full-of-scammers-and-lazyasses to get off their asses and do some real work (not 'get a real jerb', as BS likes to hurl at everyone when he gets hoity toity).
Well, I guess we'll see what happens. I think that the longer people are in here, the more they respect the common etiquette of the culture, but as the rewards draw new users, I think we can expect to start to see a spam problem. And then probably someone like @smooth or @abit will start using whale power to precisely neutralise them. And then we will have HF20.
I will post a bet on this if anyone wants to keep a book!
Understood and no being able to vote for yourself would force you to vote for others. So we shall explore this idea more as a community and see what we all think of it.
That is precisely what I am putting this out there for, to get a discussion going to untangle all the threads and see what we really have.