Currently, when a moderator deletes a user all of the user's votes are removed along with the user themselves. I was pretty surprised at this behaviour when I first heard about it, and I don't think it is a good idea to throw away all of the votes just because the user is deleted.

Votes are locked after a short while and you can't change your vote unless the post is edited. This is a precedent that shows that users don't have complete control over their old votes, their ability to change or remove their votes is restricted for the benefit of the whole site. I don't understand why users that get deleted are suddenly exempt from this restriction.

The drawback of removing the votes is that we throw away valuable information. Voting plays an important role on SE sites, and every time an active user is deleted we throw away some of that information.

I also don't see why rage-quitting users get to remove one kind of contribution (votes) while we stop them if they try to remove their other contributions to the site (posts). We stop users from deleting all their posts because they still provide value to the site, I don't see why we shoud treat votes any different. They might have less value than posts, but they are useful to the site as a whole.

I'm ignoring any vote invalidation in connection with vote fraud or sock puppeting for the purposes of this post. Those votes should certainly be invalidated, but that doesn't usually happen by deleting users.

To prevent abuse of user deletion for vote fraud, there could be some minimum requirements on account age and reputation, below those requirements any votes would be discarded on deletion. Any suspicious voting patterns of the user should automatically block the deletion until they have been checked manually. This is of course more effort for the moderators, but account self-deletion doesn't happen so often that this would be a problem in my opinion.

The recent change to counting reputation from deleted questions if they are old enough and have at least three upvotes moves the whole reputation system further into a direction where reputation can't be taken away after some time. The reasoning for this change was that even though certain questions are off-topic now, they used to be on-topic and therefore the reputation earned had some meaning then. This provides further precedent that reputation shouldn't be removed retroactively on a large scale.