What, exactly, do you think the purpose of computing a SHA prefix is? It's to perform distributed, decentralized leader election. The leader who wins has the privilege of proposing the next block. "If somebody does it faster" is the voting aspect--nodes vote on who they think did it faster, and it is quite possible that they disagree (which can only be resolved by another round of leader election, since the next leader can choose which block to continue from). In the event that there's a longest chain, of course, nodes will go with the longest chain as a tiebreaker scenario.

I know far more about Bitcoin than I ever wanted to, believe me. You really should not be making these kinds of ad hominem arguments when you don't understand terms like "consensus" or "leader election."

> No, there is no voting and there is no leader election.

Every 10 minutes a miner wins the right to append a block to the chain, by guessing a secret number. The chances of winning are proportional to the amount of money each miner has expended in the process of guessing the secret number. This is equivalent to holding a vote every 10 minutes in order to choose who gets to append the transaction block. Therefore, you're wrong. There's a vote. And if you can't understand this obvious fact about bitcoin, you have no business discussing bitcoin.