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Possible Duplicate:
Isn’t the “vote too old to be changed” a little too eager?
Scenario:
I read the question, skim through the answers... one of them doesn't seem to answer the question so I vote it down. I come back a few minutes later after making some toast. I read through the OP's question again and it seems my original take on the question was wrong, invalidating my downvote on the answer I mentioned earlier... But... I can't revert my downvote!
Surely this needs to be fixed, no?
This is brought up constantly on meta, so I'm sure you can search and find posts about it, but one main reason you can't undo downvotes is strategic downvoting, where people post an answer and downvote other answers on the question to make their answer look better. Later, they remove the downvotes to regain lost rep and not look suspicious. The downvote undo delay used to be longer, but I think that was the main reason it was shortened quite a bit
I think it's rather obviously not a "bug" though, since it says "it's been too long, this vote is locked in" -- it's intentional behavior
