A post's score is supposed to mean something. It's intended to be a shorthand way of saying "here's the good stuff" or "this is terrible; do not follow its advice". It's a way for the community to separate the good content from the bad content.
Of course, everyone has their own ideas about what "good content" and "bad content" are. But the goal here ought to be the same: an assessment of the quality of the content. As such, votes should not be used as tools of punishment or otherwise employed to correct improper non-content-related behavior. They exist to assess the content; nothing more.
If an answer is a virtual copy-and-paste duplicate, then that's plagiarism. That's against our rules, and it should be handled through mod-flags and down/delete votes (and comments, though plagiarism tends to require bad actors, so they're unlikely to help). But in this case, the downvotes are there to get the post a low enough score so that it can be deleted.
The moderators can handle the duties of sanctioning the user, when appropriate.
But if the answer is a re-explanation of an existing answer using different words, is that alone worthy of a downvote?
The way I would look at it is as follows. If the other answers didn't exist, would you still downvote it? If the answer is "yes", then feel free.
But if the answer is "no", then you would be downvoting it for the wrong reasons. You're not saying that this is bad content.
If your goal in downvoting is to get the content deleted (in the interest of keeping the question "clean"), that's a different matter.
When I see an answer with a negative score, I want to know that the content of that post is one or more of the following: terribly written, straight-up wrong, not actually answering the question, based on faulty assumptions, actively dangerous to employ, or encouraging bad practice. If the post does not contain information that is actively bad or difficult to discern, then it shouldn't be in negative numbers.
Here's a question: if downvoting the post did not impact the poster's reputation negatively, would you still care about downvoting such answers?
I ask this because you said:
It appears that the user is fishing for up-votes on a topic that is common but already well answered.
So you seem to think that a user is engaging in misbehavior. And they probably are. It's certainly not something we encourage.
But downvotes are not supposed to be a mechanism for correcting behavior. Or at least, if downvotes are for correction, they're to correct what you post, not where you post it.
Voting is not about impacting reputation. Voting is about the quality of the content of a post. Reputation is gratitude for providing good content.
So your thoughts about voting ought not be based on how it impacts the reputation of the poster. It should be about the content.
Maybe it doesn't matter but it bugs me for some reason and I wanted to know if these kind of answers should be frowned upon and voted down or some other action should be taken.
These answers should be frowned upon. But there should be no downvoting purely for this reason. And moderators have more useful things to be doing with their time than removing such posts, so mod-flagging is not good.
At the end of the day, the harm these answers cause is pretty minimal. On any question of significant age, they will be sorted at the bottom by default. And while they might attract an upvote or two, that's not going to matter in the long-term.
If you want to inform the user that their answer is just a restatement of someone else's, you can comment on their answer. But anything more than that is either a misappropriation of a moderator's time or a downvote given for the wrong reason.
