RE: The Ultimate Guide to Voting Power (with cartoons, formulas, and code references!)
Strange that you, @biophil, or anyone else for that matter, realizes that the -1/100 term guarantees that the vote power curve actually hits the x axis, making it cero at some point if a person votes too many times too fast, and so limiting the actual number of times you can vote (some 66 times in a row if you don't wait any time), and when voting power is cero, then the system will not allow you to vote any more, until you get your voting power back through waiting time. If the term weren't there the voting power would be ever closer to cero, but never actually cero. A serial voter could then vote an infinite number of times to the tone of once every three seconds (another system limit, you can't vote more than once every three seconds) even though his vote power would be ever tinier.
I'm guessing that's what the devs had in mind, but they weren't thinking about it correctly. I encourage you to work out the math with and without the 1/100 and see if your total vote influence is higher in either case. You'll find that in both cases, your total influence is the same, and doesn't depend on how much you vote at all. (as long as you keep your voting power strictly below 100.)
The whole point of this is that your vote doesn't need to hit zero for your voting power to be limited. It is limited by the rate that voting power "drips back into the tank," not by the fact that your power hits zero.
Don't worry, I didn't get it the first time around either. But just remember: it doesn't matter how much you vote, how fast it decays, or anything. It only matters that the drip into the tank is constant.