Are we slow rolling sync with other servers, or is this just normal behavior?
Both! When we were down, content didn't federate to us. The servers trying to send that content to us will then retry and send it again, and each time it fails, they wait longer until they try again the next time. As a result, the stuff we missed will start rolling in at different times, depending on which instance it's coming from.
But also, it's normal behaviour for vote counts to differ, because we ignore downvotes, most other instances don't. We have defederate some instances, which other instances may not have (or vice versa) and as a result, we will show different vote totals because we don't have the same voting sources.