That they are closely matched doesn't remove the fact that dishonest manipulation of a poll isn't to anyone's good, and the suspicions certainly aren't taken out of thin air. It's basically taken the joy out of following the results, and that would be the case regardless of which side of the poll that was benefited.
And again, there is a practicality to it. We need honest results, a legitimate superior here in order to complete our ranking system.
For those who don't understand, these aren't just "who wins in a fight". We are using these fights to officially rank these characters in our tier list.
So you hit the nail on the head, closely matched doesn't work here. We need legitimate results for our system to work. Knowing that there are potentially tampering of a poll to sway a the results is important because we use the poll to build our list.
Agreed 100%. If proved then truly it's a shame.
See my above post as to why it matters for us. Hard to be proven true. However, we can look at past trends.
This poll has existed for three days. It's 32-30. We haven't seen ANY of our battles reach than many votes, never mind over the course of two days.
Furthermore. Thor had a 25-7 edge, evidently at one point. Just a few hours later, the poll swung to 25-29 in favor of Hulk. NO character has received 22 unanswered votes in our system, nevermind over the course of two or three hours.
Also worth noting, that since then, Thor is still winning the vote 5-3. With this being acknowledged, and with the majority of posters saying Thor, as of today (still 5 days left), Thor have the edge. And again, we need to be clear of this because Surfer has designed this format with BigThor and my's help to build this official tier ranking system. We use the winner of each battle, and color keys to create the ranks in each tier. These are factors we have to take into consideration - a poll being manipulated can potentially interfere with what we are trying to do here.