I believe I've seen automatic voting in progress. I started to identify and follow people who had a consistent history of always making $40 and above on their posts, no matter how little work went into them. Then watched. One would post a story, and then immediately they started receiving 5-10 votes. People obviously aren't reading the articles. Nu human being can read that fast. And I doubt that people are staring at their feeds just waiting for these people to post.
I'm a software developer, so I read dev-related threads on Steemit. There are quite a number of posts over there teaching people how to code up software that polls Steemit for new posts, scans the author's names, and then automatically upvotes if the name is in the bot's preferred writer list. That's not curation. That's a rubber stamp. In a way, it's a type of fraud.
How do you know they don't read the posts later? I myself sometimes vote up posts from bloggers I like and read their posts later that day (after I've written my own posts). Nothing is wrong with that by itself.
I think there is something wrong with voting before reading an article. And it shows why we have a false economy on Steemit. You're voting because it's easy, free money. What if every vote actually costs you money, to be deducted from your Steem wallet? Would you be so willing to throw around votes? That would be like going into the grocery store and blindly throwing things into your cart, telling yourself you'll figure out later whether or not you actually need all that stuff.
And then you get home and realize that it's food items you would never even consider eating.