I'm notified of end complaints about this on my FAQ answer about the "user was removed" messagemy FAQ answer about the "user was removed" message (some related old comments have been removed). It is clear to me that the behaviour of throwing away all the votes is very counterintuitive to most users, and they become annoyed and frustrated as a result.
This is creating a bad user experience. It would have been a convenient hack for easily handling spammers and voting rings in the past, but now Stack Exchange could provide a better solution.