Overcommit seems to have changed somewhat since the "early days," as it's now heuristic. I ran into this once when I couldn't malloc 8 GB on a 64-bit machine because RAM + swap was less than 8 GB. http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/vm/overcommit-a...
A flaw: I might vote neutral as "I agree with this comment's current point value." In that light, 20 up, 5 down, and 500 neutral is a fairly confidently ranked 16-point comment, but 20 up, 5 down, and 0 neutral is not. However, the less confident one should be "floated" to a small portion of users to get more votes.
TIL! I went and dug up a citation: https://blog.reverberate.org/2013/08/parsing-c-is-literally-...