Ah, I get it. You are using a captcha not for its resistance to automation but as a way to make a user pay (with time) for an action.
If you start with the assumption that no one will try to attack your site, then you don't need a captcha at all. You can give the user any annoying/time-consuming task (e.g. "click a square ten times"), or you can insert an inconvenient delay in vote submission. However, people may object less to the inconvenience of something that looks like a captcha, because they are used to them.
Needless to say, almost no one uses captchas for this purpose. Instead, they use captchas to make their sites more resistant to automated abuse -- as you almost certainly will need if your sites become popular.