But votes are information that normal users should definitely not be able to see at all.

Votes on Lemmy are public. lemvotes.org exists, and Friendica and mbin both expose votes, and then obviously it’s decently simple (though not super-trivial like those three methods) to set up your own instance and look over all the votes.

You might feel that there should be a special category of “lesser” (you say normal) user that is unable to see votes, even though another category of user is able to. We could talk about that philosophically, but regardless, normal users can see votes. Vote accordingly. The error lies with the Lemmy UI being designed in a way that doesn’t make it clear to people that their votes are not fully private.