Question: I was looking at a question that I had answered, and the person who had asked the question had many badges (including a gold badge and 6 silver badges), but only 1 point. And when I click on the profile of that person, the profile says that it is suspended until **November of 2021** because of "voting irregularities." Here is a screenshot of the above profile:

[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PmyFu.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PmyFu.jpg)

These voting irregularities are (I assume) the person in question having a bunch of downvotes on questions/answers that others deem appropriate. This person has been an integral part of multiple communities, with 251 points in matter modeling and hundreds, if not thousands in ELL, which is where I found this profile. This has been happening more and more often, with dedicated users being suspended for things such as voting irregularities. So my question is as following: Is it fair for these committed users (across all sites) that obviously add to the community to be suspended for such a long period of time over something as inconclusive as "voting irregularities?" Because to me, it seems a little harsh to suspend a veteran account (which has contributed greatly) for such a long period of time, and I believe that this should be lessened or a warning should be issued beforehand. Any thoughts on this issue would be greatly appreciated as well as to where I can find what constitutes as voting irregularities, because it seems kind of broad and vague.

EDIT: I looked further at the profile of this person and found the following:

[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cEEHN.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cEEHN.jpg)

So I have absolutely no idea as to how 7 votes would lead to a suspension over voting irregularities.

Answer: 
There's not really much that we can talk about in public about a specific user but someone doesn't generally make it to a year long suspension without having done something repeatedly after several warnings. That's how we guide moderators - generally a warning followed by 7, 30, and finally 365-day suspensions for repeated infractions, particularly for the same or similar activities.

There are several ways that accounts can commit voting fraud, including by using fake accounts to vote for a primary account (sockpuppeting) or by using fake accounts to target votes at someone else. In these cases, the standard action is to delete the sock accounts and suspend the primary account with an explanation of how voting on our network works.

You can also commit voting fraud with a single account by targeting your votes at one other user - targeted voting is not allowed, particularly targeted downvoting, so someone who downvotes another user a lot may be suspended for the abusive behavior of attacking a person with downvotes. If this is discovered, the votes are invalidated by staff (mods can't do this) and the user will often be suspended with information about how votes should be cast based on the content of the post, not who wrote it.

I can understand that you find this troubling but, should it not be more troubling to think that someone achieved that high-rep status by falsely inflating their own reputation or chose to use their voting privileges to target another user on the site for votes? That is something that I don't like, whether it's done for a positive (upvotes) or negative (downvotes) reason.

Someone who has fallen into this several times, so that they have made their way to a full year suspension, may be struggling to understand what I see as a very simple request - vote on content, not the people creating it. How much reputation a user has amassed in the time they've spent on the site shouldn't really impact that much - and 1k reputation - which may seem like a lot to some, isn't actually that much in the grand scheme of some sites.
> 
> Is it fair for these committed users (across all sites) that obviously add to the community to be suspended for such a long period of time over something as inconclusive as "voting irregularities?"
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> 
> 

Objectively, **yes**.

You don't know any further details other than the fact that they were suspended for voting irregularities, and year-long bans are **not** given lightly.

We mortals only see this from one perspective - maybe two if the person who was suspended posts about their experience on social media (and [that has happened before](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/288229/1079354)). You're not going to get the full picture, so establishing if it's "fair" is above our pay grade by a ***lot***.