Several of you have asked how exactly our voting process works, so here is the explanation...
Votes are collected for one week after the contest ends. We capture the ArtWanted.com Member ID along with the persons IP address from the computer they are voting from. Only one vote per person, per entry is accepted. If two votes are received from the same person on the same image, the highest rating is kept and the lower one is deleted.
In order to get as many votes as possible, we do allow anonymous people to vote for the contest. However by capturing the IP address, we can remove any duplicate votes from the same person. Only about 10-15% of the votes are from these non-ArtWanted.com members.
We tally all of the votes of our members only, then tally the votes including anonymous visitors. If the anonymous votes change the 1st-4th place winners, they are all thrown out and only the member votes count. Otherwise, they are included in the total votes. To date, we have never thrown out any votes, because the anonymous votes aren't enough to change the contest standings.
We throw out the highest & the lowset vote (2 total) to get a more accurate average. We also scan the votes for someone that has voted really high for an image and very low for all the other entries. These 'favoritism' votes are also thrown out and not counted. Our staff also votes for every contest and their rankings are counted as double-votes.
We encourage everyone to vote for all entries, but it's not required. We take voting averages for each piece, so it doesn't matter if they received 10 or 100 votes, it all works out. However, there is less than 5% variance in the total number of votes per image, so most people are voting for every entry.
The winners are notified via e-mail on how to claim their prize(s) or they can contact us directly.
With all these steps in place, we feel that we have a very accurate and fair way to judge all entries. We hope that everyone is enjoying our weekly contests and we encourage you to participage as an entrant or a voter. Enjoy!