Can admins and/or moderators unvote votes?

Question

Does the community have total control over voting, or can moderators/admins unvote votes for what ever reason?

Comments

The unvoted vote presumably makes it so that you have no registered vote on the answer, your little arrow doesn't appear, and you can vote again. If this happened even once to anyone, someone would have come screaming about it here long ago.

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@ron maimon That's a good point, but "presumably" is the key word here. I wish you were still a mod because you could test this feature out yourself, and I trust you.

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@physicsnewbie what Ron says it's right, but you wouldn't test it out, because it undoes a large number of your votes together.

Answer 1

Well, serial voting can be reversed, and votes imported from SE can be changed.

Votes imported from SE are only changed with accordance to this thread: Not-very-high quality imported posts queue.

There has not been a single case of serial voting in the past.

Be assured, that any use of these tools will be recorded, openly, and not secretly done (in fact, I had initially forgotten about the existence of these plugins, and had was about to post a one-word answer "No"). Actually, we don't even check voter identities.

Comments

So, the answer to my question is yes: if serial voting can be reversed then any vote whatsoever can be unvoted by a moderator, right? Is there a system log file that records a moderator unvoting a vote?

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Perhaps to avoid user paranoia, this plugin should send a message to the user whose vote was undone? This is big paranoia on a voting site, that the person who controls the votes controls the site. I don't think anything happened here, but it would be good to make sure that such things never happen.

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@RonMaimon or we could just inform the user after taking any such action.