The link he claims has been flagged to death with 4 points... has not been flagged to death, and has 6 upvotes. And I see an up arrow for it.

Perhaps the reason there was no up arrow when Ron saw it is that he was one of the people who upvoted it the previous day?

Nope. I had never seen it before I tried to submit the link and was forwarded to the original submission. Maybe HN auto-upvotes in this case?

HN automatically upvotes the original article if you submit a duplicate.

Auto-upvoting makes more sense, yes.