Out of curiosity, I tried to code a simple voting-bot, and deployed it two days ago.
The main objective of the bot is set to be maximizing rewards. Quite to my surprise, albeit the very simple logic it's using, the bot managed to get itself into the top-ranking within 48-hours (I was expecting more tweaking work).
However, it's too early to draw a conclusion now, because the penalizing effect of heavy-voting hasn't kick in yet. I'll just let the bot run continuously, and see how's its performance after a week or so.
Stay tuned.