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Comment by mkingston | Hacker News Reader

I think they can, actually. I had a disagreement with someone on SO; this person subsequently went on a downvoting spree on my previous answers. I wasn't terribly worried about the points but e-mailed the mods to report the behaviour. I was told they would reverse the downvotes if the user persisted, but that they preferred not to get involved (for obvious reasons).

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Nope, they absolutely cannot. If you really doubt this, ask one in chat.

Moderators cannot even see who voted a question up or down, never mind reversing votes.

References:

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/144747/partial-fix-o...

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/229173/reversing-an-...

It is possible however for abusive user to be detected and removed, at which point their abusive voting will be reversed - see my own reputation page for an example: http://stackoverflow.com/users/1000900/guy-cook?tab=reputati...

Apparently someone was just upvoting everything they saw, hence I lost rep when they were deleted.

The moderators do not control this process. There is an automated serial vote detection algorithm.

AFAIK, under no circumstances can a Stack Exchange moderator reverse a vote.

More info on the serial vote detection process here: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-seria...

edit: I just looked at your profile and the deletion/banning of a user account will remove rep too, so I suppose in that manner a mod can "reverse" voting, but it's all or nothing. They have no way to flip individual votes.

edit2: Moderators are not employees of Stack Exchange, they are volunteers elected by the community. Of course employees can change whatever they feel like. This discussion is about the moderators.

I'm going to guess that anyone with access to the database can do a whole bunch of impossible things.

Such as, I dunno, the people who work at StackOverflow HQ.

Moderators can ask someone from the SE community team to look into it, and they can see individual votes and invalidate votes between certain users. The only cases where this actually happens are users using sock puppets to upvote themselves, colleagues/friends/family going through every post and upvoting everything or users targeting a specific user with a large number of downvotes.

The one thing they all have in common is a larger pattern of votes. SE does not act on individual votes, and emailing them about those is a waste of time.

Can moderators see who flagged his comment? there's one particular moderator who is so unprofessional every other comment should be flagged

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