In the polls at the beginning we saw a trend that we expected. Random votes coming in at varied time intervals and for a number of different videos. Sometimes similar choices were made by each voter, but that is a normal pattern when some videos are expected to be voted on often. As the days went by we noticed a very big jump in the votes for three specific videos in a short span of time. Due to this suspicion we removed the original poll and replaced it with a new identical one. We left the original poll open because if it were a bot voting, then the bot would continue to vote for the original poll, but this did not happen. In our second poll we monitored every few hours, taking screen shots of the voting trends. Over the course of a few hours, the same three videos jumped in their numbers at a high rate, and at the exact same rate. This is to say that each of the three videos received the exact same number of votes during this time. What made it even more obvious that this was a manipulation of the polls, during this time NOT ONE SINGLE OTHER VOTE was cast for any of the remaining SIFF polls in any category. At this point in time three videos with less than 100 views, had greater than 100 votes, while one particular video by a person with over 7,000 followers, over 3,000 views and a direct link to the polls had even fewer votes than these videos had. (for the record this video was well in the running for 2nd place with very many more votes than these three videos before this pattern began) Clearly, this is a case of manipulation. So, we closed the polls and reopened with the message where we asked for people to revote. We chose to use a different poll provider for this, we used Google Polls. In Google polls we don’t have to manually track the voting pattern, Google Polls does this for us. This is what we saw happening repeatedly in several sections of the revote‌
Please note the timestamp on this voting pattern. This is NOT how fair voting appears in a normal poll where people are watching and voting randomly. Even if people are voting for their friends, it does not look like this.