The admins want reddit to be hugely successful at the expense of everyone who made it that way. Shadowbanning people is a bullshit tool that they say is used to combat spam, and yes, it is most often used the way it was intended. Sometimes, though, it's used to silence dissent or cover up their mistakes.

As a moderator, you have two choices... you can either toe the line (and those that do sometimes end up on the payroll like qgyh2 and dacvak) or you're disposable. If you're going to ban someone from your site, just do it. Don't make up some bullshit reason like vote cheating because he upvoted something with his alt a couple of times. I'd be surprised if half the fucking active submitters haven't done that. I've done that. It really sucks when you post something and 10 seconds later it has a downvote, so you delete it, post it again later, and 10 seconds later it has a downvote again, in a subreddit with 2,000 users. Not to mention, a subreddit with 1 upvote and 1 downvote is not visible on the subreddit page. How much fucking bullshit is that? One person can effectively censor you in a small subreddit until someone bothers to check the new queue.

So, someone is obviously watching your account to downvote your new submissions, so you log in with an alt, give it an upvote to offset the stalker, and lo and behold, it's on the subreddit page again and has normal activity from then on. That isn't vote cheating, it's offsetting their shitty algorithm.

The downvote is just another way to harass someone. It was originally called a "downmod," and was used to remove off-topic content and spam from the front page. Then subreddits came around, and the downmod was used to do the same thing until subreddit moderators could show up and remove it entirely. Mods didn't need to remove hardly anything or have strict rules because the userbase wasn't comprised of 12 year olds crossposting from /b/.

Now the moderators are either completely inactive or are busy fighting off the zombie horde, and the admins are laughing all the way to the bank.