Why are you not asking about professional upvoters? Surely they are more of a problem?

@Oded That may well be the case, but my question which has been downvoted the same second it had been published :-) aims a one end of the voting-ananomaly spectrum. I would have complained about the other end also, but this one I noted and I sure will look out for more of it!

Guys, simply downvoting this one will -- obviously -- not help you this time without being a bit more outspoken: What here is "not showing research effort; unhelpful or unclear?"

How do you know it was the same person? Given anonymity of votes? Also - one downvote is not worth worrying about, even if you believe there is a person who has a downvoting agenda (as you put it - wisdom of the crowd drowns out this kind of behaviour). The whole point of that is to balance out the actions of those independently acting.

I am assuming the downvotes you are seeing are people disagreeing with the assumption in your post that "professional" downvoters are a problem.

I noted a couple of peculiarities and I will try to collect more evidence, but to me there seems to be some extended system of control at work. Again, wisdom of the crowd does count more without the possibility of multiple accounts, wouldn't you think so? How can we be sure it really is a crowd?

There are groups of users that coordinate voting (mostly to close off-topic posts and to clear out spam quickly) in chat rooms. The people involved tend to be knowledgeable about what is and is not on topic for a site and vote accordingly. It is very difficult for one person to vote with multiple accounts and no be caught (we do have vote fraud and voting ring detection scripts).

Fact is - some people downvote a lot more than they upvote. This is not something to fix.

I just found the next one: clear downvote record (3,000 to 13,000 on SO) quite interestingly active on some of the same questions that other user X was active. Coincidence? Let's try to find out more...

Before you spend a lot of time going after someone because of the downvote / upvote ratio on their account, you might want to read this: meta.stackexchange.com/a/220580/135615

@BradLarson Well, I can't see your score show off. But Oded's certainly does. ;-)

I do not get the downvotes here. Is the question badly researched, or unhelpful (e.g. off topic?) or unclear? And if it simply is about you disagreeing with my question (which is a bit awkward if you think about it...), why not simply tell by comment or answer as has been done by @ShadowWizard?

@gwr Surely you're aware voting is different on Meta? People are downvoting you because they disagree with or dislike your idea. You made a conscious decision to expose yourself to voting, in both directions, when you posted. You explicitly asked for the community's consensus. You're getting it.

@DanBron I am all for a good discussion and welcome critique which helps me to learn. Where your system is flawed is that disagreement is causing my repuation to melt. That, pardon my thinking, is absurd logic. So critique then is discouraged and explicitly punished - great system! Maybe democracy has some lessons to learn from SE?

@gwr You knew the rules going in, brother. Can't start complaint in the middle of the game just because you've started to lose points (and, as an aside: just in real life, surely it's unsurprising that publicly expressing unpopular opinions negatively effects your reputation?).

@DanBron What you have set up here is a system that will foster conformity and discourage divergence -- take a moment to think about what it means to discuss.

@DanBron I certainly hope, that this has been the very last time I find myself in the position of being called "brother" here?

@gwr I'm seeing pretty clear convergence, here. Maybe it is you who should take a moment to reflect on that? (And the nice thing about a Q&A site is that while it permits a level of discussion, it also permits us to distill our ultimate conclusions from that discussion in simple, direct, quantitative terms. I agree? Upvote. I can't decide or don't care? No vote. I disagree? Downvote. Where I'm from, that's how we elect presidents, and on SE, it's how we determine policy. One person, one vote. At he end, add 'em up and decide.)

@DanBron It does not even make sense on a regular Q&A site to disagree with a question (!). If you disagree with a proposition that is something different but this is a question calling for a discussion. The popup I see on my screen clearly gives quite clear criteria for a downvote with regard to a (critical question) -- it is not about a feature request! -- A downvote in the cases you describe is never linked to a loss of repuation, think again.

@gwr I told you earlier, and I offered a direct link to the details, of the fact that voting is different on Meta. In other words: you are not on a regular Q&A site right now.

I have seen this and it has been discussed controversely -- and rightfully so, if you think about it. You are using META as some kind of "vote for features" or "indicate bugs" kind of thing but are (lazily?) using the SE engine. That means whenever I post a question you do not like you can simply downvote me.

You have pointed at the way you handle policy in your country. If your country is the US please remember what your founding fathers have implemented: Majority rules - Minority rights. You are leaving that last part out of the equation of democracy. By having majority downvote any critical question and thus remove the "intruder" by "killing his reputation" you install some kind of "totalitarian democracy" (which is what the founding fathers tried to prevent).

Hey there @gwr

Was on my way to create a room, when I saw there is already one. :)

One thing I really don't want to happen is to see you just leave Meta.

Since I'm kind of on the "bad side", being one who downvotes a lot and sometimes even without a comment, I'll try to bring someone who is purely "good", by your current standards, let's see if he arrives.