Guys, I thought we went over this problem last year and became more mature but clearly not. It has come up to my attention that someone in the vex community decided to give every promote video a 32% vote, most likely without watching it. This might have also happened to other design challenge categories. This person has lowered everyone’s overall score unfairly (well not everyone’s because he/she/it gave 32% to people who had not given a url link but you know what I mean) for no apparent reason other than to boost their own team’s score or just to troll. I hope you stop if you read this because you are just demonstrating that you are an annoying kid who has no life. The RECF has given us the power to vote because they want us to put in our own input, but you have abused it. I hope no one else decides to follow suit.
dont worry too much about it
this happens every year
and near the end of voting, they all get filtered out anyhow
and everyone (the legit ones) usually places within ± 5% of everyone else
i wouldnt loose sleep over it
If everyone gets 32%, it doesn’t effect who is ranked highest.
Except for the downvoter’s own team who he votes 100% for? 
If the votes aren’t anonymous, VEX can track session data and determine which IP addresses vote a large majority of the teams down (significantly), but only one team with a high score…
Just an idea…
Sigh I think another person came through and lowered everyone’s scores again. Now only one submission has a score of over 70%.
I personally am not worried about downvoters, but its just not ethical, they should add as system to the voting where it is compulsory to leave a comment on why you voted that score, that way if you do get a low vote you can use that constructively in future entries, it would be nice to know what is wrong and what is good in your entries so you can improve them for the next year.
http://forum.robotevents.com/design/challenge/detail/148#entries
If you look at the game design competition, you can see how unfair the voting can be, with some teams using advertising to get more views & more votes, with the highest scoring teams currently also being the most viewed and voted.
If people want fair voting, why doesn’t everyone just contribute with the votes that they are entitled to, and everything will even out, with the most deserving teams winning?
Ok, just to be absolutely 100% crystal clear: there is nothing wrong with advertising your submission on the forum. It’s an option open to everybody. (though I do agree that three may have been two too many) 
Can’t people make multiple accounts and vote multiple times.
i agree. i also kind of feel like people shouldnt be able to just make random accounts to vote. one team has a 79% average and over 50 votes. this sounds like a team who has somehow aquired the help of their entire school to all vote 100 or 95 or something like that. seems rediculous but thats my opinion. in other news, my teams second in percent ! 
yay! lol please vote for team 2560E’s entry in the promote contest!
No, not from the same IP address. My family members were unable to vote after I did from our home internet.
~Jordan
VPN’s… and other ways around that…
In my middle school we told everyone in our robotics class to go home and up vote us and down vote everyone else.
Why don’t they just give the robot events account’s that have a team a vote and no one else.
Because the entire (or at least the main) reason that VEX does the Online Challenges is for outreach. (At least, it seems to be.) It gets teams to send links to everyone they know, so that they can gain more votes. VEX wants the public to be able to vote, and be involved, and learn about VEX.
~Jordan
I think what you’re forgetting is that only the finalists (and not even all of them, half the finalists are chosen by RECF) are chosen by the community. An independent panel does have the final say on who wins. I believe if you read the rules for the challenges you will also find this. Honestly, if you read the rules it shouldn’t even be a worry. So it’s not quite “corrupt”. Also, if it’s clear that someone is spamming, their vote will just be taken out.
Your right I didn’t really think that through. Kinda a dilemma then huh. Getting people involved without well getting people involved.
Maybe if they didn’t tell us the % each video had people wouldn’t be as inclined to try to raise their percent and teams wouldn’t feel cheated if they did.
I’m looking at the voting as a way of getting a guaranteed judged spot. My video does have the most views and has a particularly high average because of a MASSIVE campaign that we have to garner votes on FaceBook. However, before we initiated our campaign, we were relatively high ranked because we have what has been described by others as a “good” video. In the end, the votes really only matter for the top 4 teams because they get guaranteed entry into the final round. But the best videos will naturally become highly ranked because of their “good” qualities. We have nearly run out of Facebook friends and others to get votes from and now rely on the community for our votes. But we haven’t dropped any bit because the community likes our video. Just my .02
Evidently 30 people downvoted our promote entry ranking from 70% to 59% in under an hour
Good job downvoters…
I agree that the voting problems don’t matter to some extent as the three winners for an entry can still be picked by judges - it shouldn’t really make a difference to the winners at all but I do think the voting system does need some revisions - I feel as though it’s about who can muster the most voters from family and friends, and for some who can muster the most downvoters.
I can’t say for other competitions but the website one is getting ridiculous, far worse than I remember it being last year.
The current system really makes downvoting easy to be effective, all of the entries are hard to look at (many clicks to view, and I get lots of errors as well), and it’s easy to get lost at the bottom of a really long list of entries. For someone that is honestly going to take a look at the entries and vote it’s really difficult so they won’t get through them all, leaving the ones lower down in the dust. For those who have an agenda - vote this entry 100%, vote this entry 0% - it’s easy, just send the link and go ahead and do it! It results in these quite obviously unfair results in the voting area. I’ve never really liked these systems so my solution is to just get rid of it altogether, but some good points have been made about community outreach, I’ve had some thoughts as to how this could be made better.
These are all just ideas, and again I’m just glad that the winners of the challenge do not depend entirely on voting.