Begging your pardon, but I know the behavior you're referring to; what concerns me with the increased ability to detect this behavior is the lack of a concrete definition for what the behavior is. That's a recipe for disaster.

My impression is that the primary benefit of a concrete definition is easy communication; if my concrete definition aligns with your concrete definition, then we can both be sure that we know, the other person knows, and both of those pieces of information are mutually known. So the worry here is if a third person comes in and we need to explain the 'no vote manipulation' rule to them.

I am not as impressed with algorithmic detection systems because of the ease of evading them with algorithms, especially if the mechanics of any system will be available on Github.

Would we say that's against the rules, or no?

I remember that case, and I would put that in the "downvoting five terrible politics comments" category, since it wasn't disagreement on that topic spilling over to other topics.

Rules should also have explicit punishments. I think karma penalties are probably fair in most cases, and more extreme measures only as necessary.

My current plan is to introduce karma weights, where we can easily adjust how much an account's votes matter, and zero out the votes of any account that engages in vote manipulation. If someone makes good comments but votes irresponsibly, there's no need to penalize their comments or their overall account standing when we can just remove the power they're not wielding well. (This also makes it fairly easy to fix any moderator mistakes, since disenfranchised accounts will still have their votes recorded, just not counted.)