How subjective is tele-voting?

Nowadays, if you want to win a competition, you have to have many friends! Lots of events work with tele-voting, where the public can vote for their favorite either by phone or computer. So it actually comes down on who can gather most votes.

This subject comes to me, because our former neighbor's son-in-law's project has been chosen into the shortlist by Archifocus (a prestigious website for architects) They were with a number of competitors, but in the end only 8 remain. Their set of architectural pictures are presented on the site of Archifocus and the public can vote for one of them. Well, you can vote as many times you like if you have different mail addresses. The only thing you have to do is to validate your email, and of course also the voters can win a nice prize.

Erwin would very much like to win, and in all honesty I must say he's a good photographer. His wife is only one year younger than my sister and she and her parents lived for more than 30 years next to us. Christel was more like a younger sister than as a friend. She spent lots of time at our home. Her parents did not have a lot of time for her. Her dad worked as a teacher, but he also did a lot of extra work for others, while her mother was always in her sewing-room making clothes to order. Our dad (who equally had a full time job) however, spent a lot of time with Christel and helped her make her homework. That's why she cried as much as we did when our dad passed away. Even now, when married to Erwin and the proud mum of two lovely daughters, Christel is still a very dear friend and she often comes by.

So we like to help her and Erwin to win this competition. We've used our Facebook accounts to gather as many votes as possible. But of course the other competitors do the same. It will depend on how many people you can reach.

It's not quite fair, this system. My preference would go to a jury of well-known photographers who can judge in all fairness which pictures are the best.