It would be rather trivial (if not constructive) to make a throw away account, submit something, and upvote it. It'd be pretty easy to correlate any upvote with an a personal upvote (not to mention how easy it would be to "disprove" that upvotes worked: no change on reload) ?

I'd argue this whole shadow ban idea is a bit of a dead end, and it should just list this stuff on the profile page or something.

new accounts with 0 karma can't upvote either... you can test it by upvoting a submission and refreshing the page.

I have tested voting ring: I have upvoted a friend who has upvoted me also. Result: both of us have lost karma :-<

Woah, lost karma? That is something I've never heard or seen before. How much karma did you lose? Just 1 or 2 karma pts or more?

1 point per upvote

I know it doesnt work because I click upvote and it doesnt assign any points while a friend sitting right next to me could do the same thing and assign points. Both he and I have under 100 Karma points

Is this on a submission? A poll? A comment? Or something else? Did you reload the page? Can you upvote submissions? Can you vote in a poll?

In short, what have you tried? You're really not giving us much to go on ...

Do you write programs for other people to use? What do you do when they say "It doesn't work!" And give you no further information?