I don't think that's the case. Purely accessing information isn't useful for influencing elections in any way, any bots would have to interact with the website

I don't think that's the case. Purely accessing information isn't useful for influencing elections in any way, any bots would have to interact with the website to have an effect, and you need to be logged in for that. Since the prompt is to log in, it's more likely to prevent scraping.