I think you make some good points but I don't entirely agree with you. While not taking XP too seriously, we ought to be driven by what helps the community. I was, however, under the impression that some steps had been taken to minimize or eradicate the use of vote bots. If this is true, then I think that the opinions of monks who care enough to log in every day and spend their votes are valuable to the community, even if they rarely post.

If not, it seems (without having thought this through very carefully) that it would be fairly easy to defeat many programmatic attempts to vote by generating hidden dynamic form names and controls (and jiggling their positions around) to make it difficult for a UserAgent to find a meaningful way to vote. I've spent all my votes for the day, so I can't see the voting forms ... maybe this kind of 'jamming chaff' is already in place.

Alternatively, it might be possible to compare a voting pattern with a known 'real' human pattern (if any real humans were available for study) and identify candidates for investigation through statistical analysis.

Of course, all this presumes that someone cares enough to put some time into defeating bots. It seems like an interesting problem space to me -- one that would have some real-world applicability for Google and other sellers of click-through advertising.

I think it's just a fun way to track participation on the site; not necessarily a rank of how much perl you know. Some people with high rankings who hasn't posted a lot still have been around and know what's going on on the site and can probably direct a newbie in the right area.

The only thing that should give you confidence in what someone writes is how it works when you apply it to your situation.