It is not uncommon for a submission to get that many points and zero comments. No voting ring is implied. The votes on this submission look perfectly legit to me. Probably they were from users who found the article interesting but don't have anything substantive to say about the topic.

Threads are sensitive to initial conditions, so could you please email [email protected] with concerns like this instead of making it the first comment in a thread?

Sure, will do. I compared this post to all the other ones on the first two pages and pretty much everything had comments by they had ~10 points.