I was waiting for the person who took the original action to take up dealing with the situation. But since you choose to make a public plea, I'll add to the public record some information.

it seems there was an "incident" years back with some mass downvoting that involved suspicion of my account.

"involved suspicion of [your] account"? Well, the abusive votes were cast via your PerlMonks account. On several occasions over a period of several months. When I saw speculation as to the possibility of someone having hijacked your account in order to cast those votes (due to some access to your account being via a foreign IP), I checked that the abusive votes were in fact cast from the same IP address that was used to post nodes via your account.

My recollection of my impression of your response upon learning this was that you seemed only mildly worried that someone appeared to have hijacked your IP address. And when you brought up your current situation recently, you appeared to have forgotten that your voting privilege had been revoked (and that you had said that you "didn't mind" at the time), and, more startlingly, had forgotten that someone had hacked access to your IP address at the time. When I reminded you recently that the votes had come from the same IP as you posted nodes from, you didn't appear at all worried (indeed, you didn't even touch on that point in your node above, despite mentioning that you remembered that you had changed your PerlMonks password).

So I personally find the most plausible explanation for these observations to be rather obvious. But none of it matters since we are in agreement that 2 years w/o voting ability is sufficient punishment (even with you having been "inactive" for much of that time) for a first offense (even assuming the least flattering explanation) and so your voting privileges will be restored quite soon.