How to combat behavior of a malicious serial down-voter?

Question

It would appear that there is someone periodically roaming the boards downvoting literally everything; questions and answers. They seem to stop eventually, but I suspect this is due to them hitting the limit of votes they can make, rather than saying to themselves that the fiftieth answer they've read today is the first undeserving of a downvote. This would strike me abusing the privilege of being able to vote at all. It seems to have been happening daily for approximately a week, and has been noticed and commented upon by multiple users.

My question is simple; is there any way whatsoever to combat this behaviour? Can we find out who is doing it and take away their voting privileges? Can we cancel their downvotes? Can we (figuratively, not literally. Well, maybe a little literally) kill them with fire? At the moment, the only option is to upvote to compensate the effect of their downvote, but this requires us to either upvote something we would probably not have upvoted before, which I dislike doing, or to have our upvote essentially cancelled out by their downvote.

It simply makes the board a more annoying place to post when you know you're going to be downvoted no matter how good your question/ answer is. The fact that people often bandwagon and give further downvotes to a previously downvoted question doesn't help, and I can easily see this driving away new users. Someone like myself is miserable and lonely enough that it won't have much effect on me, but newbies are another issue.

Answer 1

I have had many of my questions/answers downvoted only once without any given reason. So, I can understand what you are saying.

But here is what I have to say:

At the moment, the only option is to upvote to compensate the effect of their downvote, but this requires us to either upvote something we would probably not have upvoted before, which I dislike doing, or to have our upvote essentially cancelled out by their downvote.

Upvotes should NOT be used to correct someone else's downvote.

So, I would say that no, don't upvote something just because someone else downvoted it. Upvote it only if you think it deserves an upvote.

That's what your vote is counting for, after all - vote for what you think, not for what other people think. Their own votes are used for their opinions, after all.

First answer of the above link

Also, this shouldn't discourage you from posting. Keep posting. If your posts are good and deserve upvotes, they will get them; one or two downvotes won't be such a big issue.

If a user is targeting you in particular and downvoting a lot of your posts, the automatic script will catch him; don't you worry.

Answer 2

I think the first thing you'd have to do is give an example of this happening, and then we could talk about whether it's harming the site.

When have you seen this happen? I just had a look through the first page of the most recent questions and don't see any signs of every question and answer being downvoted.

I didn't look as closely at the next 2 pages of questions, but the voting patterns look normal to me: some Qs and As have a log of upvotes, some have a few, some have one or two downvotes, a few have more than that. The posts that have 0 or -ive net votes seem to generally deserve their scores. I don't see anything that looks like pile-on downvoting.

I'm not clear on why you're either reluctant to vote or you don't think that's enough of a response. If you're looking at a question and its answers and putting in the effort check how many up and down votes there are why wouldn't you just vote at the same time? If you think a post deserves an upvote, and someone else has already downvoted, isn't it better to give the post your upvote? OTOH, if you think the post is "meh" - not really worthy of a vote - why is it hard to imagine that someone else thought it was bad and downvoted?