What are some best practices for ensuring the security and integrity of a PHP-based voting system?

Issue: To ensure the security and integrity of a PHP-based voting system, it is important to implement measures such as input validation, parameterized queries to prevent SQL injection, and using prepared statements to prevent XSS attacks. Code snippet:

// Input validation to prevent SQL injection and XSS attacks
$vote = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'vote', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Using prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO votes (vote) VALUES (:vote)");
$stmt->bindParam(':vote', $vote);
$stmt->execute();