I am surprised that most questions have fewer votes than the answers. It often happens that a question has no vote, or even a negative vote, but the answers have several votes. As egreg says:
if you deem a question worthy answering, then it's also worth a vote
Why do (top) users on this site have such high reputations?
Why answer a question that doesn't deserve a vote?
Here are some unsubstantiated musings on some of the reasons for the vote differential.
The picture effect. Answers with pictures get lots of votes. Questions with pictures not so much.
The drive-by voter effect. Much of the traffic on the site is casual "drive-by" users who don't necessarily participate in the site actively but come via Google to solve a particular problem. Answers solve their problem, questions don't. (Even though obviously the answer depends on the question). So answers always get more votes than questions.
The vote-for-the-person effect. High reputation users rarely ask questions, but answer a lot. Some high reputation users are rumoured not to know how to ask a question. :) But an answer from a high-reputation user will tend to attract upvotes just because it's from a high-reputation user.
The upshot of these three factors (and there may be more I haven't though of) is that answers will inevitably gain more upvotes than questions.
Sometimes really bad questions can in fact be answered, and the answers will be useful to others. There are a couple of sort of these types of questions:
The "just do it for me" question. The topic of endless meta debate (should we or shouldn't we...) these sorts of questions are inherently bad because they often just post an image of the desired output and nothing else. But since there are plenty of people who enjoy making nice TikZ drawings just for fun, they often get answers, and the answers are very good.
The crystal ball question. Some questions are bad because the information given is really just not adequate to provide an answer. But many of us have extremely good crystal balls which allow us to figure out a good answer anyway. Such answers often end up answering the question (or the question is partially clarified in comments), but it's still a bad question.
With both of these sorts of questions, a vote differential between question and answer(s) is almost inevitable.
Added by @percusse for testing the vote differential hypothesis #1
\documentclass{please stand alone}\begin{document} some magic \end{document}
$PATH variable. I get ! LaTeX Error: Missing \begin{document}. It tells me I'm "in trouble here". Would it help to try XeLaTeX? I'm kind of afraid to do so.
The comment of marmot above notes a key aspect of this issue: many questions are badly asked, but still answerable, and the answers to such questions can be good, so the question does not deserve an upvote while the answer does.
A question can be bad because it lacks an MWE or the MWE is too long, which means that the answerer needs to spend time making an MWE or trimming it down. Or the question fails to specify what the error is or what the desired output is, which means the answerer does not know whether or not he is solving the right problem and whether his solution is correct. Or the question shows code in a screenshot. Or the question shows too much or too little backgorund information. Or the question is is clearly made up and unrealistic - etc. etc.
If, despite all the extra work and guessing involved, somebody answers the question, and the answer provides clear code, good explanation, a screenshot of the result, etc, then I think an upvote for this answer is deserved.
Note that I do it the other way around as well, i.e., vote for the question and not the answers, because I want the electorate badge :)
biblatex documentation. ...
biblatex examples, because that is what I usually play around with. The examples were mainly to dispute the (general - as I read it anyway) claim that people would certainly be able to answer their own questions if they were able to formulate it as a good question. This may be true a specific type of question, but not in general. The number of people responding or interested in the question does not seem to be a relevant to my claims.
That egreg is always right is, of course, axiomatic. However, what you claim follows does not.
if you deem a question worthy answering, then it's also worth a vote
OK.
But why should we answer only questions we deem worthy of answering? At any rate, I don't only answer questions I deem worthy of answering.
if you deem a question worthy answering, then it's also worth a vote
OK.
But what if we have answers left but no votes?
if you deem a question worthy answering, then it's also worth a vote
OK.
But I've certainly seen zero-vote questions with answers by egreg.
This is not inconsistent since egreg may answer questions egreg does not deem worthy of answering, egreg may have answers when egreg has no votes, egreg may not vote for everything egreg thinks worth a vote or egreg may not have inferred the implications of a general policy to the effect that egreg votes for all questions egreg answers for every instance to which that policy applies.
