“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” John Wooden
I could have tried to express this in 3 paragraphs, but John Wooden already said it too well!
"The second is a voting system that leverages the wisdom of the crowd to assess the value of content and distribute tokens to it." -SteemIt Bluepaper
At this point, voting bots are not "illegal". It's up to "us" collectively to embrace or reject them. Embracing requires no new action above wider adoption. Rejecting them requires consensus in thought and deed. Not easy to achieve. Especially when you factor in the current distribution of SP and the monopoly of power resulting.