You must have 50 earned merits to vote
This feels too restrictive to me. I would have opted for a lower number, say 20 earned merits, but that's just me.
See
this list: 2924 users received 50 Merits, 5632 users received 20 Merits.
And for some of those "received" doesn't mean they "earned" it.Exactly for this reason I would not mind to see a 50 merit requirement. It's a good number. Higher number reduce the possibility to abuse. Earning 10 to 20 merits by abusing is way easier than earning 50 merits.
I was more thinking of expanding the "Note":
You must have 50 merit or be a
full member or higher to vote ➥
Note.
The OP can, at its discretion, ignore the votes of recently awakened accounts and inactive posters
If this can be expanced to include users who didn't
earn their Merit
at OPs discretion, abuse is much more difficult. When in doubt, just check the Merit history, and if that user got 50 Merit for a worthless post, it doesn't count.