Can you upvote/downvote answers to your own questions even without the required reputation?

Question

The upvoting privilege comes at 15 reputation points, and the downvote privilege at 125 points.

If a user that has not surpassed this baseline has received a good answer to their question, can they still upvote/downvote it because it's their own question's answer, or can they only accept it, and will have to wait until they get 15 reputation points before they upvote it?

If not, I would like to propose that users with under the minimum reputation limit will be able to upvote answers on their own posts only.

Answer 1

No, there is no exception for answers to your own question when it comes to up- and downvotes; the only exception is the ability to post comments on them, because that is sometimes necessary to get a satisfactory answer. The accept vote is sort of like an 1.5 upvote (looking at reputation gained) and it will pin the answer to the top, giving it more visibility and probably more upvotes.

A similar feature request has been proposed long ago on Meta Stack Exchange: Shouldn't a reputation points-less newbie at least be able to upvote a good answer to his/her own questions? but it has been status-declined.

Answer 2

For a lot of new site users - they just aren't interested in why we vote, edit, close questions, and so on - they just want an answer to their question. And that's ok! Not everyone has to be an avid and active member of the community to ask their question. It would be nice, but it's not a realistic expectation.

The users that do stick around will generally write a halfway-decent question/answer or two, at least enough to earn them 2 upvotes to unlock the upvoting privilege, after which, your proposed change becomes moot.

So while I agree it makes sense to allow new users to vote on answers to their questions, to me this would seem to be a fairly niche issue.