An average user absolutely benefits from being able to see who voted on a post or comment and what their vote was. A person noticing that someone is actively down voting their content in a deliberate way empowers the user to have it dealt with. Mods might not queue into that kind of targeted harassment.

All these comments comparing a vote on Lemmy to a vote within a democratic election are incredibly juvenile frankly. Its reductionist when saying Electoralism is equivalent to a Lemmy Vote and egotistical when saying a Lemmy Vote is equivalent to a ballot cast in a democratic election.

Your vote isn't private in either case regardless. At most you need to know someone's birthday, first name, and last name to find someone's voting record in America (might depend state by state). Someone willing to set up a Lemmy instance to see your votes is also capable of then setting up bots to specifically target you with down votes, which is the more egregious of the two actions.

Given the ease in which someone could create a bot network for the purpose of targeting someone or a group of people with a downvote campaign, I think it's only just to allow regular users the power to see votes and act on that information. Why should this information be gate kept to only the technically capable?

Keeping votes "hidden" maintains a kind of voyeuristic experience for those with the power or technical knowledge and resources while maintaining this illusion of privacy for the masses.

Make them visible to all.