No vote recorded, but still "locked in" without edit to answer

Question

The answer at http://audio.stackexchange.com/questions/332/rule-of-thumb-for-the-level-of-pre-show-music-in-a-theatre/334#334 wouldn't let me vote on it yesterday; it said my vote was locked in unless the answer was edited.

Today, the same thing happened for http://audio.stackexchange.com/questions/436/any-reason-not-to-convert-wav-to-flac-and-save-some-disk-space/437#437

What's strange is, I didn't have a vote recorded. I might have voted and then toggled back to no vote; does that count? Whatever the cause, it seemed a strange situation.

Answer 1

Yes, voting then undoing the vote still counts as having voted. Once you vote, you have a limited time to change that vote (unless the content of the message is edited).

The purpose of being able to remove your vote is to give you a bit of time to say "oops, I didn't mean to do that." But locking it in avoids situations like tactical down-voting where a users down-votes someone else's post to give themselves an advantage (by ranking higher in the list). They would then go back and remove the vote later. The lock-in mitigates that behavior.