We have proof of work to rate-limit spam (of both content and signals), and there would be no reason for anyone to spam the network (for votes - for other things there are plenty of reasons) because anyone can get exactly the moderation they want by picking out their mods. Elections cannot override local selections — they exist as 'recommendations' to the local user, in the case the user has not made a selection.

That said, there is still quite a bit of power in controlling the view of those who can't be bothered to make a decision, so we make it so that an election vote only counts after the user actually first posted in that community 2 weeks ago. So if there's a flood of new votes, the mods can temporarily suspend voting process.

Lastly, the elections are not mandatory for all communities, so if a community is created as a 'monarchy', for the lack of a better word, the elections are not applied by default. This makes it so that there is no incentive for mods to keep 'temporary suspension due to vote flood' state indefinitely, since they can just switch to monarchy if they want to do that.

Mind that in that case, the user can still make choices, or even enable elections - the only thing that would change is that the default user would not get election results applied to the default mods. But if that user wants, it can still enable elections and vote, and by enabling that it would get the election results applied — but due to his or her own explicit choice, not by default.