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I've noticed that if I downvote an answer, the record of the downvote is visible to me in my profile. But when I view my profile from another browser that's not logged into Stack Overflow, I've noticed that I don't see the record of the downvote.

So I was wondering if the downvote record is visible only to me? If so, is this done to protect downvoters from retaliation?

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  • Regarding your P.S. - this is a risk we all must take.. sometimes people will just disagree with what we say even if it's technically correct. Some people might even downvote just because of bad grammar. But it's all part of being in open community where anyone can freely downvote same way he/she can upvote.. – Shadow Wizard Wearing Mask Jul 5 '11 at 11:45
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    P.S. I frequently downvote without leaving an explanation. I enjoy my right to vote anonymously. I do the same thing when voting for president. Well, I used to try and leave comments, but the poll administrators always get mad, and that stuff never goes well... – Cody Gray Jul 5 '11 at 13:36
  • I remember that someone found out who downvoted their post on mi.yodeya (He outed him on Vedibata Bam ) – Shmuel Jan 27 '13 at 3:06
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No, the detailed voting information displayed under the "reputation" tab in your profile is not available to other users, including moderators. Downvotes really are intended to be anonymous.

We can see where you lost 2 points for a particular post (either a question or answer) of yours being downvoted by others, but we can't see detailed information about the posts by other people that you have downvoted. For example, here's what I see when I snoop around on your profile:

   

More detailed information about when exactly you downvoted was publically available for a while after the feature was rolled out, but that was determined to be a bug and fixed.

It's also worth suggesting that in the future, you can generally verify this sort of thing either by logging out of the site completely, or by enabling your browser's "private browsing"/"incognito"/whatever feature, and viewing the page in question.

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    Upvotes were intended to be anonymous too. – Double AA May 10 '12 at 6:28
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The only information we currently have public for everyone to see is the total amount of downvotes - for example, right now you have 112 downvotes total in SO.

If someone is following this, he can see this number increasing and know you have downvoted something, but can't know for sure which question or post it was.

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