If a majority of an audience wants something, then they can fork. That's how open source works. If I considered the issue significant enough and worth the hassle, I could fork it - with varying degrees of success depending on how skilled I was at doing so. Security through obscurity is a big no-no in open source, and that's what this private voting is. Mbin, lemvotes, or just setting up your own instance as an admin - there are plenty of workarounds to get at the data for a bad actor, it just feeds speculation and manipulation for a problem that isn't there, and a popularity contest is not a counterargument.

"Screw everyone, I'll do what I like" is a hallmark of every principled open source developer, a tradition set by Linus Torvalds himself. People don't use their software because it is a popularity contest - there's no shortage of popularity contests that have been excluded from the Linux kernel - people use it because the function meets the demand, and the democratic recourse if they don't like it are forks.