So, I was a little curious myself, so I did some poking around. In order to retrieve the 'private' information of how many votes a given user has left, you need to be logged in as that user. I was able to recreate the behavior described above using curl, a command line web user agent. All my testing uses the -v flag to generate verbose information.

Before logging in:

$ curl -v "http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=16046&for_user=chargrill"

OUTPUT:

* About to connect() to perlmonks.org port 80
*   Trying 66.39.54.27... * connected
* Connected to perlmonks.org (66.39.54.27) port 80
> GET /?node_id=16046&for_user=chargrill HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: curl/7.13.1 (powerpc-apple-darwin8.0) libcurl/7.13.1 OpenS
+SL/0.9.7i zlib/1.2.3
Host: perlmonks.org
Pragma: no-cache
Accept: */*

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2006 22:40:46 GMT
< Server: Apache/1.3.29
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked
< Content-Type: text/xml; charset=ISO-8859-1
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<XPINFO>
<INFO site="http://perlmonks.org/" sitename="PerlMonks" style="" genti
+meGMT="2006-11-25 22:40:46" min_poll_seconds="30" foruser="chargrill"
+ id="474411">
Rendered by the XP XML Ticker</INFO>
<XP xp="4051" level="14" leveltitle="Priest" xp2nextlevel="1349" votes
+left="-1">
</XP>
</XPINFO>

* Connection #0 to host perlmonks.org left intact
* Closing connection #0
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Notice, the "votesleft="-1"". To get a cookie:

$ curl -v -c ./curl.cookie "http://perlmonks.org/?" -d user=chargrill 
+-d \
passwd=MYPASSWORD -d expires=+10yrs -d login=Login -d op=login

(OUTPUT TRIMMED)
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Using the cookie to check the ticker:

$ curl -v -b curl.cookie "http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=16046&for_user
+=chargrill"

OUTPUT:

* About to connect() to perlmonks.org port 80
*   Trying 66.39.54.27... * connected
* Connected to perlmonks.org (66.39.54.27) port 80
> GET /?node_id=16046&for_user=chargrill HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: curl/7.13.1 (powerpc-apple-darwin8.0) libcurl/7.13.1 OpenS
+SL/0.9.7i zlib/1.2.3
Host: perlmonks.org
Pragma: no-cache
Accept: */*
Cookie: userpass=HASHED_INFO_REMOVED

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2006 22:44:38 GMT
< Server: Apache/1.3.29
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked
< Content-Type: text/xml; charset=ISO-8859-1
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<XPINFO>
<INFO site="http://perlmonks.org/" sitename="PerlMonks" style="" genti
+meGMT="2006-11-25 22:44:38" min_poll_seconds="30" foruser="chargrill"
+ id="474411">
Rendered by the XP XML Ticker</INFO>
<XP xp="4051" level="14" leveltitle="Priest" xp2nextlevel="1349" votes
+left="0">
</XP>
</XPINFO>

* Connection #0 to host perlmonks.org left intact
* Closing connection #0
[download]

Hope this helps :)

s**lil*;  $*=join'',sort split q**;  s;.*;grr; &&s+(.(.)).+$2$1+; $; =
qq-$_-;s,.*,ahc,;$,.=chop for split q,,,reverse;print for($,,$;,$*,$/)
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