Do cookies prevent voting spam?

Question

I'm making a simple star rating feature in PHP to my site and my general question is, do cookies prevent people from spamming multiple votes? As far as I know I can store a cookie with javascript and PHP. What's to prevent the spammer from testing the feature, looking at what cookies are saved and then remove/add them in the spam attack script? A sub question would be, what should I save in the cookie? That the person has already voted? What's to prevent the spammer from automatically delete all cookies before a spam attack? So far I've got honeypot, secret code calculated by time and some other things and IP blacklisting. I will try to stay out of captchas and recaptchas. JavaScript questions and answers, JavaScript questions pdf, JavaScript question bank, JavaScript questions and answers pdf, mcq on JavaScript pdf, JavaScript questions and solutions, JavaScript mcq Test , Interview JavaScript questions, JavaScript Questions for Interview, JavaScript MCQ (Multiple Choice Questions)

Answer 1

Here's the fact: At the worst possible case, a user may get an entire new computer to cheat your system. And there's nothing you can do about it. So no matter which client-side protections you have, they can be broken. Cookies are trivial to reset. Sessions rely on cookies, hence, trivial to reset. IP is easy enough to reset (or use a VPN or some other such service), moreover, mobile devices change IPs as you walk down the street. The only real way is to authenticate your users (i.e. a login system) and only allow for authenticated users to vote. Note that a Cookie will probably work for 95% of the cases, if you don't care the occasional cheat here and there. If cheating must be prevented at all costs, you need an authentication system.