Preventing multiple votes with cookies

Question

A common method for preventing non-members from multiple voting is to set a cookie (regardless of possibility of deleting cookies). In numerous discussions about this issue, one point is ignored. For every vote, we should set a new cookie, and the number of cookies can be easily increased to tens.

Since cookies are sent with HTTP request, sending tens of cookies should slow down the HTTP response. In this case, the visitor will keep sending tens of cookies when browsing the site (even without voting action).

My question is how much harmful is to add numerous cookies to prevent multiple votes?

Answer 1

The overhead is probably not going to be great, but if you have the voting under a specific path, say /dovote or even /dovote/voteIssue1 then you can use the path so the cookie is only sent when accessing that resource and not for every access to your site.