Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: Obligatory RIP my inbox.
I’m gonna write a script that randomly injects upvotes and downvotes and then also posts responses after a random amount of time to prevent time correlations. People freak out most often when they don’t understand something, I continue to explore everyone to think things through logically and try not to assume new subjects are anything other than new and likely to cause some confusion/incorrect assumptions