Is it possible to keep rep from being awarded?

Question

Is it possible/are there tools and opportunities available which can be used to delete awarded rep prior to its being credited to an answer and posted?

Answer 1

To clarify, you are now asking "Say someone posts a really shitty answer and gets 10 rep, and I post a really good answer to the same question and get only 1. Is it possible that I might have gotten more but they were intercepted and destroyed before being posted?".

I don't know the innards of the SE system, but I can't imagine the answer being anything other than a flat-out resounding "NO"!

Each answer gets the rep it gets according to the votes it receives. That's how the voting system pretty much has to work. I've never noticed rep I've gotten to be out of sync with votes received, and I really really doubt SE is fudging the vote tallies.

I think the real problem here is your view of crappy versus good. Keep in mind you're only one judge, with all the other users also being judges. Others will have different opinions. If not, then there wouldn't be any point to the voting system. If the voting is as skewed as in your example, then there is a good chance that you are the one that's missing something. Put more bluntly, you don't get to decide crappy versus good on your own. That's something only the community as a whole does.

Sometimes a "popular" answer gets more votes, but that's usually because it was written in a clean and accessible style. This allows more people to understand it, which then makes more of them feel they can upvote it. A technically correct but obfuscated answer will get less votes. Perhaps you think that's unfair, but consider that the purpose of this site is to build a repository of good answers. Being technially correct is necessary but not sufficient for a answer to be good. A good answer is also accessible to the target audience. If nobody can decipher your correct answer, then it's not really a good answer after all, and the votes will reflect that.

If after stepping back and trying to evaluate the other answer without considering that it's competing with yours, and you're still really sure it's wrong, then you can downvote it. However, you should be extra careful about downvoting competing answers. Downvoting another answer so that yours gets ranked higher is NOT what downvotes are for. Personally I won't downvote a competing answer except when it's blatantly wrong because I want to make sure I'm doing it for the right reason. When doing that, it's useful to leave a comment explaning exactly what the objection is. It's only fair to let the author rebut and present his argument. In the end it's still your vote, and you don't have to change it if you don't agree with him.

Unfortunately there is a darker side to downvoting on SE, especially if you take the trouble and do the courtesey to explain why. Downvotes are anonymous, so occasionally you get retribution dowvotes or just vandalous downvotes. The same kind of small-thinker that screws up his answer is also more likely to then take out his frustration on you later. Sometimes it's a downvote on your answer in the same question, but usually they go thru your profile and randomly downvote things. For example, last week I got 6 downvotes on totally unrelated questions and answers in the space of 2 minutes. Clearly that was just a vandal or someone being a jerk. It happens. However, I still leave comments the vast majority of times I downvote, particularly on answers. It's the right thing to do.

Answer 2

A user can request to be dissociated from an answer. The answer becomes anonymous. This can be done only by community mods.

This happens very rarely. To date, I'm not aware of a single such case on EE.SE. I've seen that happen once on Academia.SE. The user was concerned that his superiors will identify him with the post and offline retribution will come.

edit:
The O.P. had clarified the scenario, which he had in mind. In light of that: no it's not a possible for a 3rd party to stop the upvotes and reputation from being awarded to the author of the answer.