If it was the feds, the part I have the most trouble accepting is their need to be involved with the administration at all. I think a mix of "radical" undercover fed accounts and a wiretap on the voat servers would give them all the functionality they could ever need from the platform.
Make no mistake, I believe voat is crawling with feds of every type, I just think they're more about surveillance and entrapment. Maybe in the case of the CIA or NSA they might try to sway popular opinion, but even that would be best done with sock accounts and an army of bots to manipulate vote totals (IMO).
I don't disagree with you, but the left has always had a need for control. Maybe it isn't three letter agencies that may have taken over voat, but I firmly believe there is some deep state fuckery going on, or possibly some Soros funded folks taking over the admin for the sole purpose of doing what has happened lately: divide the user base and pit us against each other.
It is happening with the U.S. as a whole with rich vs. poor, brown/black vs white, straight vs. rainbow, christian vs. atheist/islam/whatever, et al. and now within the right we are being split by outside forces as to weaken us to their fight.
As you've said, I can't rule out the possibility of both radical leftist and federal fuckery. Hell, there are probably many more groups pushing for their various agendas. If you look into the alexa analytic data for voat, some of the click-throughs and referring sites strongly suggest that there is a significant Chinese influence on voat.
IIRC, something like 3% of the traffic that ends up clicking through to voat comes from a Chinese language forum that uses the same format as voat/reddit. Based on some of the other context, those same domains are the source for many of the taboo porn subs on both voat and reddit. Upon inspecting those users profiles on voat, they mostly just post and never comment, which suggests non-English speaking users, or scripts.
Obviously Israel and Russia have their agendas as well, but they cover their tracks and use VPNs, and are probably totally apathetic towards voat vs. any other forum they can shill on. Which is to say, you can pretty much throw a dart at a spinning globe and reliably hit a group that actively works on voat and other sites.
Once again as you mentioned, the one thing they all have in common are their attempts to divide and distract us.
Based on the lefts' ability to meme and online presence coupled with how the feds have fucked up and covered up in the past, I would not put sloppiness past the feds, much less a small branch of them attempting to control narrative on a site dedicated to free speech.
Damage control or not, Voat no longer seems like it is for free speech, but likewise controlling their own narrative and policing what they believe as "wrongthink."