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I have cast an erroneous vote on a question but cannot rectify my mistake. The tooltip says my vote is "locked in" and I can only change my vote, when the question is edited. Why ?

Can I do something about this myself ?
Otherwise, can a moderator help ?

I don't want to unduly influence the vote by erroneous vote.

Thank you.

3

As I see it you have a few options:

  • Do nothing, like Oddthinking suggests. You could just decide to not care, as we all make mistakes from time to time. A single question upvote is only 10 reputation points (formerly 5). Plus, I like to think of votes on questions (at least on Skeptics) as meaning "this deserves an answer", not "I agree with the opinion of whoever posted this question".
  • Get an edit approved and then retract your vote, since if the post is edited you will be able to retract (or switch) your vote. As a low rep user your edit must be approved by others so you need to make it good. Alternatively, you could wait until someone else edits the post, but there's no guarantee anyone will.
  • Delete your Skeptics account. Because you've done nothing on the main site besides accidentally upvote a post, you can delete your account and the vote will be deleted with it. I'm pretty sure your account will be deleted immediately if you do this. (This does, however, seem like it could be seen as an abuse of the ability to delete an account though.)
  • thank you. great answer. Will the account be deleted for all SE sites or only for skeptics.SE ? And once deleted for skeptics.SE only (if possible), can I later recreate a new skeptics.SE account from scratch by joining it to my site-wide SE account ? (I hope the question is understandable) – summerrain Dec 10 '18 at 10:21
  • (how) can I ask a moderator to remove my erroneous vote ? – summerrain Dec 10 '18 at 10:24
  • May I suggest to make bullet1 stand out more? That last sentence especially is the main point, really, and the other two options I would consider "abuse", technically, although minor. – LangLаngС Dec 10 '18 at 10:33
  • Upvotes on questions mean "this deserves an answer". I like that. – fredsbend♦ Dec 30 '18 at 20:14
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Just edit the post. I do it all the time to change a vote, especially on meta and especially if I've changed my mind. If the post needs editing anyway, it's a win-win.

The official line SE will give you is "blah blah you should really be sure before you vote blah blah blah". Note, this is in no way universally accepted by all the users. It is in fact brought up somewhat frequently on MSE.

My full thoughts on changing meta votes: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/252636/212646

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I would suggest this isn't worth that much concern - voting on Stack Exchange is always a noisy signal, and one extraneous vote won't make a big difference.

There's not much you or a moderator can do (without encouraging worse behaviour than the occasional extraneous vote)

Here is some more information about how the feature works: What are the limits on how I can cast, change, and retract votes?

"Tactical downvoting" is one of the motivations for it: If you just witnessed tactical downvoting, is it a reportable offense?

  • Thanks, but it doesn't only bother me for SE, but also for myself because the vote cast is against my core beliefs. (Imagine you erroneously cast your vote for a political party you despise, if that helps.) – summerrain Dec 7 '18 at 13:23

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