Ok here goes.

A skilled programmer could write a very smart script in an hour or two time that would generate emails in any which way they wanted them. Unique email addresses, random votes, different messages therein... even timed such that they would trickle out over the course of a few days.
I'd be very, very, VERY surprised if you could tell if they were real or not, because if you could, that would mean you'd have some very low level understanding of how email systems work, which obviously is not the case since you chose that to be the mechanism by which these votes are carried out.

How do you think spammers do their thing? It's the exact same mechanism.

A better way to do it would have been to have people go to a site to vote, and before their vote is counted, a message is sent to the email address they used, with a unique link in it.
When that unique link is clicked, it proves that they were able to receive that email, and that the address is valid, and then their vote is registered.
No this does not stop people from having multiple email accounts, but yes, it does protect you from doing what I have described above, which as I said, would be difficult for you to figure out.

I'm not trying to be a jerk here. But you wanted to know. So there it is.

I'm sure there are tons of people out there who know languages such as Perl and PHP, many of which you probably know, that would have been glad to help you write a system similar to what I proposed. It would not take more than a couple hours worth or work at most, all you had to do was ask. I'm sure even here on BOA alone there are quite a few people that would have volunteered a couple hours of time to write it. (Myself included).

I am not implying that any of the votes that have been cast have been done by this method. I am simply illustrating to you just how high the potential for abuse is.

Banking on the fact that people will play honest is pretty silly.

Now get out your text editors kids! :lol:





Er... no please don't