Thought: while I am as a BIG believer in downvotes for bad answers (ie, wrong or off target) as I am for bad SOPWs (insuff info, gimme's, repeated questions that have already been answered for the specific OP and such like) you might want, instead, to write well-considered replies as correctives. If your unnamed poster insists that 2+2 = 5, why feel free to note (even, sarcasticly) that conventional arithmetic holds the correct sum to be 4.

And frankly, since the first several downvotes could boost your XP, it might be hard to distinguish between XP-whoring and a campaign to discourage a spewer of falsehoods.

That said, on to your specific questions: Were you to conduct a vendetta based on poisonality, programming preferences or other inappropriate^*1 reasons for downvoting, the Gods (and Tye in particular, in his incarnation as a deity) may have the power to invalidate such votes.) And he has posted (finding it is left as an exercise to those with more ambition than I have at this moment) a fairly detailed explanation of the XP-loss-algorithm.

^*1 "inappropriate," that is, for some value of slease, error, obnoxiousness, etc., that I suspect neither you nor I can define in 20 words or fewer.

OT: For me, the capability of downvoting the upvoters of some of the worst SOPWs posted here -- such as the gimme's; the repeated requests for solutions to problems for which the OP has already been given solutions, etc... -- would be a bene.

Update: look for "dog votes" -- an indication you've exceeded the downvote tolerance in tye's rule.

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