How does this downvote federate to my instance when the instance of the comm the post is on doesn't allow downvotes?

So my understanding is that non-local communities receive interactions from other instances, then the host instance relays those interactions to all subscribed instances.

It’s also my understanding that when an instance disables downvoting, it also doesn’t relay downvotes onward.

So how do I see this?

This is the scenario:

1. A hexbear.net user posts to a hexbear.net community [downvotes disabled], which gets relayed to all subscribed instances like mine (thelemmy.club) and mander.xyz, etc.
2. A mander.xyz user sees it and downvotes it, which is sent to Hexbear
3. Hexbear receives the downvote and discards it (or at least, I always assumed so)

If it had been one of the local users of thelemmy.club I could understand seeing it, as it would be recorded in our local database. But how am I seeing a foreign downvote on a Hexbear community?

When downvotes are disabled on an instance; they’re just not displayed to that instances users. Nor is the downvote button displayed (so those users can’t downvote).

The instance will still receive and track downvotes from outside instances; showing the data to other instances that don’t hide it. The data is still there, it’s just that the instance admins chose to not display them to their own users.