I think the point here is that if you have edit ability on other people's questions, presumably it could be dishonest to change your vote on that question based on your own edit rather than someone else's edit. It's a little strange, in any case. If you thought you could improve it to the point where a downvote wasn't necessary, why not just edit instead of placing a downvote in the first place?
The exploit nature makes sense, too. Downvotes matter most on questions which are near 0 in their vote tally. If you go and find your own downvotes on questions which have been downvoted to oblivion (say -5 or more), or upvoted highly, then removing your own downvote will have little effect. The question will still have a ton of downvotes or upvotes, but you can get your shiny rep point back.
All that said, I'm still not convinced that the problem is big enough to warrant a fix. It seems very edge-case to me.