Okay, yea, that does make sense. I was thinking of electronic votes, in which case there wasn’t much stopping them from storing that data. But you can get a paper ballet where your name isn’t on it. Regardless, actual voting isn’t a good analogy. You can change your vote on an internet forum, you cannot with a ballet.

Let’s say on lemmy, up or down vote, it reported “Bazoogle has voted” and simply adds a number to the variable without my name tied to it. If I wanted to undo my vote, it wouldn’t know whether to subtract an up vote or down vote unless it knew which one I did in the first place. The only other option would be to try and encrypt the username with some sort of identifier that can’t easily be decrypted. Which might be possible, but is beyond my current knowledge of cybersecurity.