The tally at the time of me seeing this is 10 up votes vs 4 down votes with an overall score of +6 (10 - 4 = 6). When content is posted, all sources get a +1 which becomes the default score (+1), so however many times you vote based on different sources, your vote still counts as a single vote using the 'best of' method, meaning that we tally all of your votes based on sources and either give it the effect of +1, -1 or 0 (no effect). As for up votes that aren't from a specific source, this is also not possible, they either have to come from the Front Page, the Local Feed or any of the tribes that the content exists in. It is however important to note, that the vote break down shows TALLY scores and not total vote counts for each source, this means that the Front Page score of 0, could be 2 positive and 2 negative votes. Also negative votes even if done multiple times by the same "voter", are only counted once in the final tally.
Either way, there is a lot of calculations being done behind the scenes with votes, and we figured it would be best to display it so that everyone can see what is happening. The last thing I expected while reading through this thread with my morning coffee in hand was to see such well thought out theories of vote manipulation come to light. I mean, the simple reason is out of the question of course, I guess it's the more boring answer to that very tantalizing question.
Anything can be gamed, we don't need to look much further than the US election to see that. I will be going over the vote registration for this whole post to see if the numbers add up as they should, if anything is off we will work out what happened and post an update. I do however have a feeling that if its anything, it's very likely a display error in regards to the down votes. Either way, the spam account has been suspended for posting spam, and I found another matching the same IP address that I have also taken care of. It's possible there is at least one up vote from the other account which could have contributed to the post becoming more visible.
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