Is it just me, or do you not believe this also...?

AMc

I agree that taking two spots like that with similar subjects seems slightly surprising but for all we know that photographer is famous in that city and mobilised the local tourism industry to promote themselves and the destination.

A friend of mine was running a charitable funding scheme.
Within a very short time of starting various project organisers reported they’d been contacted by companies offering large volumes of votes for money. The honest organisers were concerned that they would be bought out by less scrupulous fundraisers. A lot of click farming and robotic voting was found and excluded. Then they had to deal with the people who’d tried to buy their places complaining they’d been unfairly demoted or worse that they’d bought their votes with good intention to compete with more popular projects. A minefield.

It’s pretty simple to game most electronic voting if you have will, skill or cash.  There are places in the world where you can buy a room full of people to repeatedly stream and share your YouTube video etc.
A botnet can make several thousand clicks for a few cents on machines that are running malware so not even that easy to trace.

I’ve learnt through experience in various photo competitions I’ve entered that what I think is a great picture isn’t guaranteed to win.
In the “just for fun” forums there’s often a clique and they can post a blurry wonky low contrast shot and get tons of votes. Post your favourite shot of the year but if you’re not in the clique you’ll get nothing.

I entered the KLM photo contest for a while but gave up in the end as I couldn’t see why any of the entries that won deserved their rating.

I only enter things for fun and don’t stress if I’m not successful. It’s the picture taking I enjoy even if shares, likes etc are nice they aren’t the end game for me.

273K

Yeh I'd call shenanigans on that too. He might have got away with it if he hadn't engineered two top 10 entries. I agree they're not up to the standard of the others. The Machu Pichu one makes me laugh though, is it shopped? I might be wrong but those llamas look well out of place. and the sky's pure white. Funnily enough I was in Florence last year, and took some pretty similar images, but certainly wouldn't enter them in any competition

roll1later

As an @anyoneelseIhavemissedoff I’m not sure if my opinion counts but he's just played the game, and nearly won. He can brag to his mates that 'hey I got a 4th and a 5th in a compo for my photography', and just hope that no one asks to see the pics. I don’t know how he’s managed to manufacture his 4th and 5th, some sort of interweb magic.

Any comp, where on line voting is involved, is always going to throw up some surprises.

There’s people I follow on Flickr who get loads of favs for a nothing special photo, heck I’m confident that some I follow could post a pic of a dog turd and it'll be fav'd, maybe even explored!

cR4cKF0x 5TevE

For me, #1, #4 and #5 are very underwhelming.
Most of the rest are visually impressive, though some of the processing is questionable.
Its pretty easy to influence any on-line vote if you can mobilise friends/colleagues/a group/forum to vote a particular way.  Perhaps (ahem) you could seek to 'level the playing field' via AVF?