Good idea my friend. And what a good idea from those people who host/feature new authors. That is a gr8 way to equalise things.
One way to stop people only following 'highreps' is to only allow a certain proportion of upvotes, in any given day, to be applied to them. So, if you had say, 20 upvotes per day, you might only be allowed to upvote 5 or 10 of those. Or how about a 50/50 system? You could have it so that anybody who had upvoted a 'lowrep' would then be allowed to upvote a 'highrep', but they couldn't upvote another 'highrep' until they had upvoted another 'lowrep' ? Or something along those lines. Nice post