The only alternative would be for the votes to be secret, with the OP having to accept the DM votes. But that would be crazy for him to manage all the votes and it would take up a lot of time.

I just thought (@icopress) of another use case: Say you're running Awards, and you want to keep entries confidential until a certain date. You could require all participants to PM you, with a CC to "LoyceVs PM publisher" and delay=<days left>. That way the campaign manager can already see the entries, and once the contest ends, anyone can verify all entries.
You don't even have to (fully) trust me on this: each participant can verify their own entry.