If a user is new and receives down votes, they cannot get negative reputation (or even non-positive, i.e., 0) right? So if that user gets down votes, then earns reputation, does the loss of rep they would have earned from the down votes continue, effectively preventing them from earning rep until they have made up for those down votes, or is it simply lost when they are at 1?
2 Answers
No.
Votes are always applied in order. So any down-vote after the user hits 1 has no effect on the users reputation.
If a new user gets 5 down-votes followed by 1 up vote they'll have 11 points. This will be true even after a recalculation.
Retracted due to inaccuracy; see comments
My understanding is that their normalised rep will not show any effect (as you say, that cannot drop below 1) but that it will effect their actual reputation. That is to say until their account's reputation is recalculated the effect will not be seen on the site.
So if someone on 1 rep has 5 downvotes they will be on 1. An upvote will up them on 11. After a rep-recalc they will really be on 6.
If you're not aware your actual rep can be see at https://superuser.com/reputation, although you can only see your own not others.
Some events (such as I describe here, but also deleted or migrated questions/answers among other things) cause the normalised rep stored and shown on the site to deviate from the actual value for the user.
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No - votes are applied in order. If they got 5 down-vote before the one up-vote this will always be the case so their rep will always be 11.– ChrisFCommented Oct 22, 2010 at 8:09
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@Chris Actually, yes, I suppose this is the inverse of not getting points to balance down votes when you hit the rep cap? If you pass 200, then get a down vote, you still only score 199 that day (assuming no other votes after the down vote), you don't get 1 back from one of your capped up votes earlier in the day.– DMA57361Commented Oct 22, 2010 at 8:23
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