Is there an issue with (my) daily vote limits?

Question

I believe that the limit for votes is 40 per day, but I think mine has occasionally been closing early over the past couple weeks.

Today, for example, I have 33 votes recorded on my vote list. A "daily limit reached" sign came up around 30, when I was trying to upvote a comment. The same sign occurred with two other comments, but I was able to upvote both questions and answers (thus the other three), and the review section does not have the "out of daily votes" sign where it sorts what review tasks I am eligible for.

This is merely kind of annoying, but it's also not the first time this has happened. A little while ago, probably less than two weeks, I noticed that I seemed to be running out of votes early - I noticed there was a lot of time until the votes refilled first, since I tend to switch between sites, and so I would usually see hours between short bursts of activity, instead of running out of votes two hours into 24.

If it hadn't kept happening for several days, I would have thought I was merely mis-remembering how many votes I'd cast or going through the questions on the site unusually quickly. I did notice that on those days, a vote would sometimes go through later for a question or answer, but not for a comment, and for a while I wondered if those extra votes were coming from the next day's total. Once I found the vote record tab, I started keeping track and we come to today, when it definitely closed early for comment votes.

So - I am trying to figure out what's happening. Is this happening to anyone else? Does someone know the cause? Have I missed something very obvious, like a maximum on how many votes daily can be given to comments as opposed to questions and answers? I did check the Q&A and did a search, but didn't see anything.

Any answers will be appreciated, thank you.

Answer 1

The vote limit is more complex than a simple "40 votes per day." There are a number of meta questions about it, including this one and this one.

The basic idea, though, is:

• You get to vote 30 times in a given day.
• Every time you vote on a question, you get an extra vote, up to 10.
• As soon as you hit your limit, you're locked out until the next day, even if you had "unearned extra question" votes left.

In other words, to get to 40 votes, you need to cast 10 of your initial 30 votes on questions; if you voted for 3 questions and 30 answers you would get locked out at 33 votes.

Also, the daily allowance is based on UTC time, so your allowance will reset after midnight UTC, not midnight in your timezone (unless it's the same).

Answer 2

You always get at least 30 votes on questions and answers per day. (I don't know if there's a limit on comments, but if so it's independent of Q and A votes.)

If at least 1/3 of your votes are on questions, you will get up to an additional 10 votes per day. You have to maintain that 1/3 ratio up to the point you start getting "You have 5 more votes today."

It's also possible to get more than 40 votes in a day:

If you vote on questions that get auto-deleted, your vote count doesn't go down, but you can cast those votes again, e.g. today I could cast 43 votes if I wanted to.