Their morality is definitely not up to spec, but they can come in handy from time to time. Watching how they manipulate counts when the stakes are lower allows the programmers to protect against attacks they wouldn't have considered for when those stakes go up. Voting machines definitely have had this issue. Some of the exploits demonstrated for manipulating them are so simple it just makes you shake your head. It's always better to have script kiddies hit it repeatedly and then analyze what went wrong than to wait until the result is really important and end up giving a professional hacker a really easy day.what is stopping them from doing to same thing over on start engine or the next general election.
Elio will probably be using reCaptchas, IP/UA banning, combination geolocation/timestamp, or any of a range of other strategies on any open voting from here on out.
I'd be interested to see what sorts of protections Reg. A+ campaign hosts like StartEngine could employ within the limitations imposed by the regulation, because they're going to need them. Elio will probably be okay--the regulations are just too new and it isn't a controversial enough campaign to attract the kind of attention that would really pull out all the flaws of how the technology and legislation are currently meshing. But if my little tracker (that I didn't think would cause any issues considering it was all public data being displayed on their website if you took the time to write it down and check it against your watch) exposed an area that hadn't been ironed out yet, I'm willing to bet there are a lot more.
I really doubt we'll see them in any meaningful way by July 31st, but we'll probably see them within the next year or two.