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Q&A Voting on a closed question

Yes, these options should continue to be active. A bad question is a bad question, and it is legitimate to downvote it because of that. The fact that it might be fixed later has no bearing on it ...

posted 3mo ago by Olin Lathrop‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Olin Lathrop‭ · 2024-09-09T12:19:57Z (3 months ago)
Yes, these options should continue to be active.

A bad question is a bad question, and it is legitimate to downvote it because of that.  The fact that it <i>might</i> be fixed later has no bearing on it being bad now.  Perhaps there should be a way to notify downvoters when a question is re-opened so that they can decide whether to retract the downvote, but that's not what you asked about.

Another reason to accumulate downvotes on bad questions is to keep the total vote tally for the user accurate.  Really bad questions don't tend to be from well-meaning users who happened to make a mistake.  Most are from spammers and the like.  Having their vote tally be negative will be important if/when we ever implement rate limiting or temporary banning based on accumulated vote score ("rep", if you like).