From what I understand votes are publicly available data, Lemmy just chooses to hide them to prevent the “chilling effect” where people feel afraid to vote honesty for fear of repercussions. Then they reintroduced it for admins so they can do their duties in stopping vote manipulation, for example people who go onto your profile and downvote literally every comment you make (it’s already happened to me like 3 times) or those who use all of their alts to try and sway momentum on a comment their main makes. There’s also times where there’s no justification for a comment being upvoted; perfect example is when a nazi says “based” in response to an article about someone being racist and it gets like 20 upvotes. I don’t think anyone reasonable would be against a banwave on something like that.

Obviously admins can see everything that goes through their servers for what should be obvious reasons, so this is more of a convenience thing. Moral of the story: don’t join shitty crypto instances.