Primary tool used to quickly search for good answers (and often questions too) and corner brick of SO/SE is..voting. Other sites use similar method to highlight featured answers (for example Amazon).
Motivation
One point where I think this system lacks is to highlight answers with high number of downvotes. Let me use an example:
Answer Votes Score Total Up Down 1 10 6 4 2 2 10 2 0 2
They have same final score but their history is pretty different (and probably their quality too). Such controversial answer may be a result of raw voting ("is it +3? should be good, let me up vote!"), wrong down voting or anything else but for sure it's more controversial and reader should take much care (and this is should be highlighted).
Improvements
I can't suggest (and even imagine) to change this mechanism but a better index may be needed to highlight this kind of answers. For example Amazon style would be: 6 persons of 10 did find useful this answer.
A short text like "6/10" may be viable but a better index may be more useful. Let me call this index "agreement index", it should be calculated using the number of up/down votes. Let me use another example:
Vote Voter's reputation +1 1000 +1 2000 -1 100 -1 100
Score for this answer is 0 and unweighted index may be 50%.
I would even introduce another index with the score calculated according to reputation of each voter. For example weight of each vote in this index should be calculated using rep of voter. In this case we may have index of agreement 50% and weighted score of 0.875 (1000/3200 + 2000/3200 - 100/3200 - 100/3200) that may be rounded to 1 (see this meta question
about this topic). I wouldn't suggest to replace score with a weighted score but to integrate it somehow.
What I suggest is (finally!) to add two simple numbers near the score, like this:
Advantages
Weighted score: browsing answers you can quickly judge them with a weighted score according to voters' reputation. If we judge answers (also) according to user's reputation then why votes shouldn't be judged in the same way? At least if you want to see it...you can. This may be especially helpful for OP and for someone else who lands on that page searching for the same question (very often answer with more up votes is not the best one from a technical point of view but the one more easy to implement or to understand).
Index of agreement: you can easily highlight controversial answers: to read them carefully and to contribute with your vote, to better read them before use, to highlight "anomalies" in the votes for the question.
Disadvatages
Index of agreement: it's easy to expand votes to see how many up and down votes there are so we essentially duplicate information (and it'll make screen more "noisy"). It's true but it's an important information I would highlight more.