Several Stack Overflow Contributors Suspended for Voting Irregularities, Again

Voting fraud on Stack Overflow is a common problem that the site administrators deal with constantly.  Typically, one or more "sockpuppet" accounts are used by the same person to vote on their own posts. Fortunately, the system is good at detecting these voting patterns and stopping the abuse, but it certainly can go on for long periods before they are stopped.  It's a manifestation of one Stack Overflow's many design flaws, but that's a longer (and ongoing) discussion, that has been an issue since the beginning of Stack Overflow.

I've seen users get suspended for a variety of reasons, including "low quality contributions", need for a "cooling off" period, and voting irregularities.  This week, one or more Stack Overflow contributors were recently suspended for voting irregularities.  Based on my reputation history for October 4, there appears to be at least 5 different accounts involved (or the corrections rolled out slowly as the system sifted through just one user's votes).

Aftermath of the removal/suspension of multiple Stack Overflow users.

What this shows, I believe, is that these users hung around the [matlab] crowd, where I've posted 99% of my own answers, and they occasionally up-voted answers belonging to people such as myself.  (Note that I was an active contributor for about 9 months, with over 600 answers, so it's actually surprising how few votes I accumulated from these users).  Anyway, when the users are either removed or suspended, the rep gained from their up-votes is removed also.  This "penalty box" state is standard procedure according to mods and I've seen it in the past as users have deleted their accounts.  If this was a single user, there would be one entry in the reputation history, but there are multiple, so that could mean multiple users or the system took it's time computing the corrections.

The penalty box as envisioned by Jeff Atwood.

So, who is/are these users?  It's probably better not to ask.  :(  But... I almost exclusively contributed in [matlab], and just about every other top contributor to [matlab] shows a similar adjustment to their rep because of a removed user, so it's clear that the tag is the common thread. I'm not going to link and I'm not saying names here, but you can compare today's top-users page with the archive from a month ago.  Please note that because an account is suspended does not mean that person is guilty of anything, just that anomalous activity is being investigated.

I'm disappointed when I see this kind of thing happening, assuming the allegations are true, but not surprised.  There is no doubt in my mind that votes often get doled out  -- way too rapidly -- based on factors other than post content (I'm talking about multiple users on the site, not necessarily the users in this case).  That can be hard to prove, but is unambiguously against the rules.  Now, the suspensions could be lifted tomorrow if the moderators' investigation leads them to believe there was not intentional violation of the rules.

Whatever the case may be, these suspensions are likely to last no more than 30 days.  The offending votes will be reversed, and the user will be reinstated.  Stack Overflow moderators believe that people should be given a second chance.  I think they are right.  Let's not dwell on who and if anyone broke the rules.  The problem is the gamification of the site.  Unfortunately, while the competition for reputation (SO points) is what brings so much great content to the site, but it's also what drives people away -- myself for one.