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On March 29th and 30th of this year, a couple of users were deleted. I noticed that at least one very high-reputation user lost about 13K in reputation from these deletions (which amounts to about 3% of his reputation total).

I'm curious: what happened here? My understanding of stackexchange policy was that in cases in which deletion might cause such large reputation changes, the mods would step in to manually over-ride them. Is this not the case?

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    $\begingroup$ I guess: If, during review, it becomes apparent that the user is or ever was involved in voting fraud, the votes are discarded as they would normally be. $\endgroup$
    – Daniel Fischer
    Apr 16 '18 at 18:31
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    $\begingroup$ The fact that reputation loss is so localized does suggest an abnormal voting pattern on the part of those deleted users. $\endgroup$
    – user357151
    Apr 16 '18 at 18:45
  • $\begingroup$ @bro: Your link is no longer pointing at the right place. Anyway I guess people can figure out. $\endgroup$
    – user21820
    Apr 17 '18 at 15:41
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    $\begingroup$ When a user has over 400k rep it's fair to assume they have a few favourite users who have followed them and voted on their questions over the years. The sum of all rep on the site at the last count was around $42,000,000$ so we would only need a user of rep $420k$ to be deleted, for everybody on average to lose $1\%$ of their rep. We would expect a positive covariance between the reps of pair of longstanding users. $\endgroup$
    – samerivertwice
    Apr 19 '18 at 15:12
  • $\begingroup$ @ProducerofBS "so we would only need a user of rep 420k to be deleted, for everybody on average to lose 1% of their rep." No, we would need a user who had upvoted about 42K times for that to happen. As far as I can tell, there has never been such a user. $\endgroup$
    – Stephen
    Apr 23 '18 at 1:33
  • $\begingroup$ Loss of 13000 rep isn't evidence of voter fraud per se when it comes to very high rep users. And we should be reserved in throwing around accusations. And somebody's contribution to the site might also be so great we might want to give them the opportunity to save face. $\endgroup$
    – samerivertwice
    Apr 23 '18 at 3:56
  • $\begingroup$ I have not accused anyone of voter fraud. $\endgroup$
    – Stephen
    Apr 23 '18 at 12:09
  • $\begingroup$ @Stephen that's right, but the user bro and others allude to is the greatest contributor of all time to the site and has not been seen for many months now. $\endgroup$
    – samerivertwice
    Apr 24 '18 at 3:03

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