nice! have you thought about storing upvotes in a special meta article that you periodically update with the latest counts? iirc, you can use the Supersedes header field to replace the meta article so all nodes get the latest vote stats.

or you could store each vote in an adjacent thread containing the upvotes/downvotes for that article and periodically coalesce them into a single count for easy retrieval. that way, the whole system can be stateless from a single node's perspective.