This reverts commit 3e969181.

This reverts commit 5f5699c5.

The backend wrongly trusted user input allowing the circumvention of
access control checks.

Tests failed because they did not allow a charset parameter in
Content-Type headers.

Free text validation is no longer done for abstentions.

This fixes a regression introduced in
9fc360d6.

Real-time updates for global statistics are unnecessary and put a lot of
pressure on the database. Data is now cached for five minutes. The count
of online users is still updated in real-time.