I have an answer that I'm certain is technically correct. However, it continues to be downvoted. The answer has already been noted in comments on other answers to be better. It goes more in-depth than the others, yet it continues to be downvoted.
The already upvoted answers were nowhere close initially, and I had already commented on them to say why it is wrong...
Isn't there a limit for that? Shouldn't something be catching this?
The answer was down voted because I lost my keys. Please, stay with me, let me explain this odd chain of events.
Earlier today I couldn't get to the store on time because I could not find my keys. That caused me to miss the opportunity to run over a golf ball, which would have bounced between a few buildings in Makati and eventually land in one of the fish ponds at the park.
If that had happened, a fish would have been frightened, and not swum over to distract a little girl. But since the girl was distracted by the fish, she didn't stay with her dad on the way back to the car, and he left without her.
When he got home, he realized that he forgot something, but because the kid wasn't there the cat didn't hide so the guy tripped over the cat — and into his desk where he went to catch his balance.
While trying to get his balance, he accidentally clicked his mouse while the pointer was hovering over the down-vote button on your answer.
Now, because he was in such a hurry to get back to the park, he missed the grace period where he could have taken the vote back (had he even realized his mistake, which I doubt, he was in a bit of a panic at the time).
So you see, it's my fault that your answer was down voted, and I'm dreadfully sorry about that. I'll try to stop misplacing my keys, but I can't guarantee anything.
On a more serious note, some have attributed this to various phases of the moon. Sometimes, well, people just do odd things. It's one down vote, don't worry about it - as long as you're sure that your answer is good, then put it out of mind. The amount of entropy involved in a site of this scale is just too much to even hope for any kind of accuracy in a guess as to why it happened.
The real question remains, though, which is where the heck are my keys? I still haven't found them.
I have seen the bandwagon effect with respect to voting multiple times. People seem to be more critical to posts with negative score and are thus more likely to downvote.
Another phenomenon is that often readers don't read all the responses but stop after the first or the second one. Since accepted answer and highest voted answers show first, people are more likely to read those and upvote them. Random fluctuations in the votes in the first minutes often determine the destiny of a post.
I agree that some care must be taken to combat these biases. One idea is what reddit does - change the order of responses to balance which responses people vote for. I also believe that in some subreddits, the number of votes is hidden until a statistically meaningful score is established.
