Okay, I believe the votes count per IP. So, you could vote from anything that can access the website.

If you mask your ip, you could vote multiple times from the same device. 

If one knows how, he/she could vote for himself many many times. 

if they did this im pretty sure pat would know and would remove the votes.

When the winner is chosen I check whether they voted from IPs that are known to be proxies.

How do you know which is a proxy and which isn't?

Do not question the great pat

There's multiple things you can check.

• Whether the IP address is owned by a person or an organization
• Whether the IP address is listed in Project Honey Pot
• Whether the HTTP request headers contain certain values

 These checks aren't bulletproof, but they work for most scenarios.

VPN?..  

The first two checks work for proxies as well as VPNs most of the time.

A different solution would be to only allow registered users to vote, but it's arguably just as easy to acquire Minecraft alts and hoard up votes with those.

coughs

nerds