Daily vote limit reached before Vox Populi badge earned

Question

I just received a notification while attempting to upvote a post on the main site that I've reached my daily vote limit. I've not been voting "today" (which I realize is delimited in UTC) specifically/artificially to get the Vox Populi badge, but it is on my radar (I'm a sucker for badges and other electronic equivalents of those old shiny gold star stickers), and when I got the notification about reaching the limit, I checked on the badge status. It's showing I'm at 37/40 votes.

I remember this happening before, I think on ac.SE, and unfortunately I don't have specifics but if my memory is correct it happened around the same time I did manage to get the badge on another site (ELU) (again, not trying to abuse the system or artificially increase my vote counts or badges, just had a long day of procrastination, most of which took place on SE). That time also, I remember receiving the notification about reaching my vote limit but still only had somewhere around 37 votes recorded for the day.

I've noticed votes take a few minutes to be "locked in," i.e. you can undo a vote for 5-10 minutes after voting, so I thought perhaps the system would register the 38th-40th votes after that time interval. But as of now my last vote is 29 minutes ago, I'm still at 37/40 daily votes, am unable to vote more, and don't yet have the badge.

Obviously a super-low priority bug, if it is one at all, but I thought I'd mention it.

Answer 1

This is by design, as described here. You are entitled to 30 votes; further, the first 10 votes on questions might not count against your 30, so the maximum possible number of votes is 40. More specifically, the 10 free question votes will be available until you start getting warnings about having limited votes remaining; once the first warning appears, you will not get any more free votes, even if you have voted on fewer than 10 questions. You can see here that the vox populi badge was last awarded on Academia.SE two weeks ago, so it is not impossible.

To me this seems unnecessarily confusing; it seems like you should be able to use your remaining question votes after expending your answer votes. But a feature request to fix this was made 9 years and 11 months ago, and the current behavior was agreed upon because "more balanced voting throughout the day would be much better than question-only voting at the end of the day." You could open a new post on Meta.SE asking that this decision be revisited, but it is not something that we as Academia.SE can fix.