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Two days ago I got some very obvious serial downvotes on SO. (Four downvotes on four old questions of mine, in a short space of time shortly after someone replied to a comment of mine on an an answer of theirs I downvoted.)

After a couple of days, the detection script noticed and fixed three of them but left the fourth, so I flagged the question it was on explaining what happened.

Today, I find that flag marked as not helpful and the downvote still in place.

Why would this be? Can the admins not see the revoked downvotes, only the remaining ones? Or if the script missed it as well, is it likely to be a coincidental vote from someone else?

(Obviously it's a tiny amount of rep involved; I'm curious as to the process.)

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Possibly the fourth vote is from a different user and as such not subject to be reversed. –  Toon Krijthe Aug 24 '12 at 8:01
For reference: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/… –  Gnoupi Aug 24 '12 at 8:01
@Gamecat That's one possibility, although the timing would be quite a coincidence - there's a gap of 12/13/17 seconds between each downvote, of which the remaining one was the last. –  Rawling Aug 24 '12 at 8:05
@Gnoupi Thanks for that - I just checked and I have three "undownvote" entries with identical times, so I assume that's the script. –  Rawling Aug 24 '12 at 8:05

1 Answer 1

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Mods can't do reverse votes or otherwise access voting data. Devs don't do vote reversal because of all the implications associated with it.

With no access to specific information, one can only speculate that the fourth one was a coincidental downvote.

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If that's the case, then fair enough. I've found advice on meta saying to flag for a mod or email the dev team if the script misses something, but maybe that's out of date advice. –  Rawling Aug 24 '12 at 10:01
@Rawling can you link me to that? –  Sathya Aug 24 '12 at 10:07
Um... e.g. first answer here and a couple answers here –  Rawling Aug 24 '12 at 10:15
I'm not sure how the misconception that we have uninhibited access to voting data started, but I hope that clears up quickly. –  Tim Post Aug 24 '12 at 10:25
@Rawling the context seems to be if nothing has been reversed - which isn't so in your case. Even after flagging, there's nothing I, as a Moderator can do. An email to team@ is checked by the Community Managers who'd probably (Note: citation required) run the validation scripts since they don't have access to vote data either –  Sathya Aug 24 '12 at 10:34
Fair enough - thanks to you both. @Tim Hopefully this'll help to start clearing it up :) –  Rawling Aug 24 '12 at 10:38

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