Form an email received by Hill commenter Rien:
“Thank you for your email and continued readership of The Hill. With over 2 million comments a month it is not possible to check each comment so we rely on collaborative filtering through our commenting system to assist in managing commenting. While this is not a perfect system it does enable us to keep comments open at a time when many are removing from their sites. Recently the upvoting/downvoting feature was being attacked by bots/inauthentic behavior and has been removed. We will not be able to offer this feature until we have a fix.”
Special thanks to Rien for the info. Oh and apps@thehill.com is the mod’s email address.