I'm guessing that there's a scenario that goes something like: "UserX is mad at Petdance. UserX votes against a Petdance node, even though it's an excellent node. UserX needs to be penalized for voting against it, because he did it out of spite, rather than for a reason." Is this the problem we're addressing?

Personally, I don't see it as much of a problem. I certainly don't want my time at Perlmonks to be buried in administrivia, and the worst thing that's happened is that my XP has gone down some. I'm not very concerned about an angry UserX voting against me, since the rest of my nodes are of such a high quality. It's a small downward blip. I've had plenty of nodes voted against inexplicably, but I don't cry over it.

Now, if the goal is to provide feedback to the writer of the nodes, THAT'S a heck of an idea. I envision something like this:

Node score: 9 = 12++, 3--
Comments:
++ Nicely done, this is a big help
++ Useful
-- Code is broken

xoxo,
Andy
--
I was dreaming when I wrote this, so sue me if I go too fast.