I recently encountered a situation where I tried to downvote a post from an instance that didn't seem to have downvotes enabled. However, my vote didn't affect the score, which made me question why the downvote button was even displayed in the first place. It felt like it was just baiting me into thinking I could downvote. This raised the question of whether this is a bug or intentional design. I believe the downvote button should only be shown when it applies.
You can downvote from your instance and the UI will "show" it, but the votes will not be counted on the originating instance with downvotes disabled.