Possible Duplicate:
Should we reduce rep bonus for upvotes on posts with a negative score?
I've nearly given up on downvoting questions. Why? It seems that no matter how awful, there's someone to upvote it. Several someones. Missing critical information? 'Pls send me teh codez?' No matter. I downvote, four people upvote.
Sympathy?
People looking for that new badge, voting willy-nilly?
A tea-party of users who want this to become Yahoo Answers?
If I were duke, the rep cost to vote would be symmetric (it would cost the same to vote up or down), and there would be a rep floor to vote for questions. Anyone is qualified to vote for answers, but questions should be voted on by people who have demonstrated that they have a clue.
Edit1: The joke in the first sentence doesn't make sense with the new title, so I removed it.
Edit2: I had considered collecting a sheaf of examples before posting this, but I went ahead because I had a sense from other discussions that a number of people of significant mass in the community were observing the same phenomenon, and might chime in. Seeing the reactions so far, I'll deposit examples, and then you can all decide if this is a real issue or, alternatively, if I'm a grumpy misanthrope.
Edit3: also posted as an answer to the thing this seems to be a dup of:
This isn't about rep, at least in my mind. It's about encouraging the effort it takes to write a question that some third person will get value out of some future day. The idea of voting for (and against) questions is that the questions that have more usefulness will be voted up, and less will be voted down. If gaming, or sympathy voting, or martians, persistently upvote awful questions, then the goal is not achieved.