Curious to know, who usually earns more votes (and why, although I doubt there is an explanation for that) a person who asks a question or a person who answers it, assuming that quality of the question and the answer is nearly identical?
I also notice that votes are more eagerly given to a so-called regulars on SO than a newcomers when questions/answers are identical in quality, complexity, and style.
An answerer by far. If you plan on trying to earn your rep by asking questions, you are doing it completely wrong.
You can gain some rep by asking questions, and you can gain a lot of rep by asking a lot of questions, but you are going to probably end up making the community think you are trying to game the system like some other users have tried.
It is also very difficult for people to vote on questions because you are stuck wondering "what makes a good question? Why is this question deserving of an up or down vote?" It is not as simple as just looking at an answer and saying "I agree" or "This answer is correct", therefore it is going to be much harder to come by votes on a question than on the answers to that question.
Answerers, by far. Voting on questions has been an issue recently in the podcasts and whatnot. We need to vote more on answers to weed out good ones from poor ones.
It depends from site to site. Some sites encourage(upvotes) people who ask good questions and some sites encourage(upvotes) people whose answers are good. Please try finding the trend which site encourage which type(asking questions or answering questions).
