As suggested I reviewed the vote stats and tracked the IPs and users behind it. It appears that we have a severe case of "split personality": there are 6 users (Juve, killer, Vital, Men_88, GOD, Vitya, Jordan_78, Fobos) who share the same IP address as LVV (212.86.98.22). All of them have registered in december 2006 (anybody can see a correlation to the start of the voting stage?). All of those users have given a 5-star rating for contributions made by LVV. All of them have rated "competitors" with 0-stars.
According to the ripe database, the IP address belongs to "Alexander L. Kirichenko; Joint Stock Company "CINET"; 43, Komsomolska Str.; Chernihiv 14000; Ukraine". It would be a really great coincidence if that company would assign a dynamic IP address to several customers who all subsequently register on the coppermine forum and submit nearly identical votes. All of the alter egos used email addresses of russian freemail providers.
The alter egos of LVV have posted on the board as well (only in Russian though, so I can't understand what the postings mean) and have posted comments on pics contributed by LVV (applauding him of course).
We have a clear case of rating fraud, Mr. LVV has obviously cheated to improve his ratings. Therefor, I have stopped the rating stage of the competition, banned LVV and all of his "alter egos" and removed his "contributions". I have reset the votes to "zero" for all contributions and changed the cookie name to allow people who have already voted to vote once more.
I have changed the permissions for the voting as Thu suggested: only members of privileged groups (contributors, translators, VIPs, supporters and devs) are allowed to vote. Additionally, frequent posters are allowed to vote. The voting stage starts from scratch - please (re-)vote.
If this second stage should turn into a flame war again, we'll close the competition without an actual winner.
It's very sad that a moron like LVV can spoil the entire competition and turn the whole idea of a community effort and subsequently the whole open source concept (where everybody is welcome to contribute) into such a chaos.
I should have considered the rating fraud issue in the first place and should have disabled rating for newly-registered members in the first place. Sorry for not considering this in the first place.
Please accept my apologies for this complicated issue. Let's try starting the competition from scratch and forget about the idiotic cheater.
Joachim