Yes it's sad people have to cheat and buy votes. I had a similar situation with a contest 2 years ago. It took me a week to get 1,00 votes, despite the fact I had, at the time, 3,000+ Facebook friends who had no interest in helping me at all. Yet in the last week of the contest, 3 of the competitors went up 10,000 votes overnight.When it comes to "buying votes" it boils down to the prize going to the person or persons who have the money to "buy" the prize. When someone runs a contest, they are doing it, NOT to give away prizes, but to market their ideas, business, products, etc. when someone "buys" votes, that sponsor is not getting REAL people visiting their site...but maybe ONE person with lots of accounts/IPs/emails etc. With a GOOD Vote Exchange, especially one like Contest Galaxy, where we monitor our voters to make sure we don't have cheating going on (hence our ONE vote for ONE vote rule), those sponsors are getting REAL people visiting their site(s). Sadly a lot of Vote Exchanges are not monitoring their users and they are rife with cheating, as well as users not really returning votes even if they say they are :( . Gives us all a bad reputation.
Good luck with your contest.
