YouTube engagement metrics (views, likes, dislikes, and subscriptions) reflect how many times a video or channel has been interacted with. These metrics can be an important measure of your video or channel’s overall popularity.
We want to make sure that your metrics are high quality and come from actual humans and not computer programs. It takes our systems some time to figure out which views, likes, dislikes, and subscriptions are legitimate.
Why can they do that? Because they tricked their followers to consent to like them. It's called carrot and stick and the majority took the bait.
Youtube literally states:
Too many dislikes?
Must be Russian robots!
If they can remove youtube dislikes, how hard is it for them to remove VOTES? Pretty easy
They remove dislikes put there by bots...lol
No, bots run by people like you.