I don't see where you've made a good case that something needs to be fixed. Your assessment of "random upvoting" is based on your failure to understand why somebody would upvote a particular node. You fail to even link to the nodes so I won't waste time trying to look at the details that you fail to present.

But even just from the information you provided, the upvotes don't surprise me at all. A node getting to -12 for "lack of effort" is a quirk of the voting system (being mildly annoying in a well-noticed way can lead to getting a lot of downvotes despite the mild nature of the annoyance) and I'm not at all surprised to find people that conscientiously and helpfully try to counter that quirk by upvoting nodes where they perceive that the accumulation of downvotes is too extreme for the actual offense.

Knowledge of this quirk is evident in that worst nodes was already mentioned.