I don't think the system is broken, I do blame the people self voting! I can't imagine any developer intervention to solve this. Any restrictions on self voting or repeated voting of same users will all be overcome by a wider circle of puppet accounts.
I've loved the 4x increase as my voting is now all manual and I'm able to meaningfully tailor vote strength. Sure it's made it easier to fully self vote, but if someone is posting 20 spam comments a day as voting targets, they'll still post 80 if it puts a couple thousand dollars in their pocket.
So even in the self voting regard the HF may have been beneficial by cutting spam posting and puppet account registration by 75%!
The solution is flags, and has to be community oriented.
I'd like to see a cheetah type bot that uses analytics like this to follow up posts and comments of those above a certain threshold, say 70% self voting, with a friendly message. "Hello! We've noticed you use 87% of your voting power on your own posts and comments! While we all need to pat ourselves on the back once in a while, it's great to get out in the community and mingle! You can find a regular rundown of engaging new content here.(insert link to good curation project.)"
The community needs to be made more aware. I know I'm not cross checking everyone's voting history, and the real kicker is that some of these 100% self voters are still getting sincere votes from other members. I even saw a post by one person who self upvotes 100% proudly proclaiming he was stopping his power down, and asking everyone to help build his Steem Power up since he's so committed to the platform!
A bot warning could give people the same pause that the duplicate content detection does for plagiarism.
The stigma around flags needs altered too. I could envision a "flag a day" educational campaign. I think everyone can and should throw a flag each day, as an important part of shaping the community.
Alternatively if an account is dedicated to combatting abuse, users should be asked to delegate SP to it and educated on how to do so. I would gladly contribute, and it puts a bit of seperation between a user and direct flagging if they are squeamish about it.
Collusive rings are harder to deal with and will probably always take a manual hand behind the controls, spotting the patterns and taking action.
And for those who equate egregious self voting with dividends and consider it a fair use of stake, you are in a sense right. But please think long term. If you can show me a company where the shareholders voted all profits be paid to them in dividends, putting a freeze on new hiring, employee raises, and all capital expenditures to support and improve operations... and the company flourished... I'll change my opinion!
Nice one,you have itemized and discusssed some of the ways to prevent these fraudulent ways of gathering votes,I hope the authorities will do something drastic.its pathetic the extent some authors will stoop so low