@Fizz yea, I think you'll have more luck suggesting that as an answer on Nicolas' main meta question (compared to your old main meta Q). One minor downside of such a choice is that it's slightly less transparent to new users (why is their accepted answer shown first when mine isn't?). I agree that setting a score threshold makes sense though and it'd be interesting to consider.

Can you tell us in how many instances the highest voted answer predated the accepted answer as opposed to the other way around? We all know that early posted answers get voted on more, and that upvoted answers get upvoted more, that highest listed answers get seen more and voted on more, thus compounding these two unfortunate yet unavoidable undemocratic aspects of the 'voting' system on SE.

The only check and balance built into this system is the selected answer. Your reasoning here seems strange. The hundreds of late but excellent and better answers which have been selected by OPs will now vanish into obscurity and not get seen by the vast majority of users, just so the annoying 28 cases where the OP has apparently made a mistake get rectified. In the latter case there is virtually no problem anyhow. Th highest-voted answer is highly visible, effectively pinned as the second post. In contrast there will be huge damage done by selected late answers dropping out of view.

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. Queries: accepted answer is the highest scoring with at least two answers posted, might include deleted answers, highest voted answer predates the accepted answer, highest voted answer posted after the accepted answer. Note that the post time might only differ by a few minutes or hours.

Thanks very much JJJ! Will peruse carefully.

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. note also the anonymous post feedback in the 10K tools (2K on beta sites) at site.stackexchange.com/tools/post-feedback, might be useful for finding underrated answers to give them some extra upvotes. I think that's the best way; if an answer is underrated then it's countered by casting upvotes. Maybe through a meta post listing hidden gems so more users notice them.

@JJJ That is just denial of the hard facts of the voting system. We might like to counter the voting system by voting, but the whole point is that does not work! Your helpful queries show that, as suspected, late answers are significantly more than twice as likely to be accepted, suggesting that they have been chosen because they are high quality late arrivals substantively contributing to the quality of the site. As this is more trivial when there are only 2 answers, it's worth noticing that doing it for posts with 3 answers or more increases this factor substantially.

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. it depends on your definition of a late answer. Is an answer really late if it's posted no less than an hour after the first answer? And even if a later answer is accepted, that doesn't mean it's a better answer, that requires qualitatively analyzing the answers. That's something we can't do through queries, you'd need to sample a set of questions, manually review the answers and then draw a conclusion from that. Especially on Politics pinning an answer can be used to promote a view the asker likes instead of picking the more nuanced answer.

@jjj "And even if a later answer is accepted, that doesn't mean it's a better answer, that requires qualitatively analyzing the answers" <--- Unless you are suggesting that later answers are qualitatively worse for some reason, the fact that where the accepted answer has less upvotes than the accepted one, it is well, well over 100% more likely to be posted afterwards, does indeed suggest that there is wide-spread judicious application of the accepted post feature.

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. what about the questions where later answers outscore the accepted answer? Then you get situations like this where the accepted answer is much more controversial (+25/-16) while the runner up is (+50/0). Not all of those questions are like that, but a fair number are. To draw a definitive conclusion, you'd need to analyze a representative sample, but that's too much work for me. ;)

@JJJ Those are very rare, but also effectively harmless under the current system, where the highest voted answer is posted with its score directly under the accepted answer. Under the proposed system, all of those helpful accepted late answers are going to, very harmfully, be buried under early come posts. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to miss out on helpful and useful information.

@JJJ But those cases where that happens are vanishingly rare, and there's always an answer underneath it to balance that out. In addition, that can still happen with the highest voted answers! Surely it's not a good reason to destroy a positive and useful feature of the sites?

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. in my view not giving askers that power outweighs the risk of visitors missing out on a good answer. I agree with you that it's not perfect, but it's about choosing which disadvantage you can live with. I'd ask you this though: why should the asker have this final say? Most often they didn't know the answer, that's why they asked. Why give that person the authority to judge?

@jjj Your perverting that. They're the only people who can possibly have that responsibility. The massive wave of people who vote on answers in the first few hours don't go back and check subsequent answers. There's no reason to give their votes such undue comparative weight. But OPs usually a) care about their question and b) are the only people who get routinely notified about newer answers. And they don't have much power, they just save good answers from obscurity. Highest-voted answers still appear in either 1st or 2nd podium position!

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. that point b) isn't true. Anyone can press the follow button to get notifications of answers and other interactions relating to the question. As for other users determining what should be pinned, I was thinking about a review queue for that purpose. If enough established users can agree then pinning makes sense, otherwise it's not needed. And through a review queue they could make it so that even new answers are considered by enough users with a proven trackrecord.

@JJJ Most often they didn't know the answer, that's why they asked. Why give that person the authority to judge? Most adults can tell a well-explained, well-supported answer from, erm, one that's not. And that's why we allow them to vote on answers too ;)

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. well yeah, but only after they earn 15 rep.

That's a good point. I'd support users only being able to accept questions after say 100 rep. But as you know, those annoying and extremely rare cases where OPs choose the wrong answers are not always ones where the OP has a very low rep!

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. yea, true. In any case, my preference would be as follows: multiple high rep users can vote to pin with support from a new review queue > no pinning (except for mod / staff pins on meta maybe?) > current accepted answer pinning (only self-accepted answers aren't pinned)