If the voting system is so easy to manipulate, then it could be anyone messing about with it.
Right, definitely
anybody could manipulate the order, not only promoting their own favourites on top but also to banish unbeloved or rival sites to the end. (That's what I meant with "voting-wars" earlier in this thread)
The reason Pete and Rob have a high amount of votes could simply be because they have a link to playmobeach on their home page coupled with a high volume of visitors and a large number of supporters. 
For sure this might be a reason (don't want to make any further speculations) ... anyway all the discussed so far can be seen quite good at the moment: the unhindered and continious #1 for the last days with a vote of 3.3 (yesterday) and about 800 votes suddenly is on place 52 with 2.8 average votes ...
Jochen, is there a way to make the system more secure so people can not vote more than once? Or does it then become too much work for the webmaster to collect the votes? 
Hm, I don't see any feasible solution to do so. I think the site owners already had spend some efforts in thinking about how to vote best. Problem is, that as long as they do not provide single accounts with which you have to log in at the site, you never can ensure that no manipulation is possible. Furthermore the current mechanism based on the IP address isn't also "fair" at all, because it used IP addresse for recognition, if a certain "person" has voted on a site or not. The problem with this is, that in case if two different people are using the same computer, only one of them (the first one) is able to give a vote. This comes even worse on how Internet is used in general. Typically going to the Internet is not done with your computer's IP address but with this of a proxy server or with the one of your cable modem/router etc. On business or larger companies who have a leased line the proxy servers do have fixed IP addresses. This means, e.g. that every person in the corporate network going to the Internet is know at the Internet with the same IP address (i.e. the one of the proxy server). For private households going to the Net, typically DHCP is used from the modem, i.e. the modem is getting periodically differnt IP addresses from their local Internet provider, i.e. although I'm the same person, but in case getting different IP addresses for my router I could vote several times. -- So concluding: mapping the IP address to an identity of a certain person is for sure an easy and practible solution, but not a fair one.
One thing the site owners could do is to reject voting requests coming from the same IP address, but this would also be an unfair solution, because in case I'm using the same Internet provider than another person who had already voted on the site, and I would get his/her IP address from the DHCP server, I suddenly would be restricted to vote on sites which this user already had voted for ... the other way round getting different IP addresses from the DHCP server would also allow me to vote several times on the same site.
So finally concluding, I do not see any method apart from introducing single accounts to prevent from missuse and to provide a fair voting system
BTW, this was the reason why I suggested to display the list in random order for default, and in alphabetic order for finding single sites, and the voting system just as a nice to have feature, because people wouldn't be that focused on where their favourite sites are listed (because either it's random or in alphabetic order).
