Lucky Lifestyle Contributor Contest: Update

So some of you may recall Sarah's persistent (i.e. incessant) nagging to vote for us in the Lucky Lifestyle Contributor Contest a few weeks back.  According to the rules, only the top 10-20 people (based on number of votes) would make it to the fifth and final round.  And since we came in 8th or 9th, I believe, I received an email stating that we had made it to the final round.  Yay!

Then a few days later I received another email, saying that the invitations to the final round were being revoked until further notice.  Apparently people had been complaining about the voting, a real shocker: basically, Lucky originally required every person who wanted to vote to create an account, after which they could vote once.  On the last day of the third round, Lucky made it so that you could vote an unlimited number of times once you'd registered.  Was it cheating to vote multiple times?  Not according to the Lucky Facebook page, where they encouraged all the voting people could manage.  The same held true for the fourth round, and several people spent literally HOURS voting for us.  I understand why the people who didn't make it to the final round were annoyed - it was a stupid system to begin with.  Lucky should have just taken the time to choose contenders themselves, rather than let us get them millions of advertising hits while they did nothing.  I can't help but wonder if this was their plan all along.  Because...

A few days after the email that revoked our entry to the final round, I received another email stating that, due to "voting irregularities," Lucky would choose who made it to the next round, and who the overall winner was.  In other words, all that voting was for nothing.  But you know, I still thought Sarah and I had a shot.  There were a lot of bad entries and about twenty decent ones, and I think ours was one of those.  Finally, after two full weeks without word, I received an email last night.  We did not make it to the final round of the competition.

I have no idea how the decision was made.  Maybe people who had "suspicious" numbers of votes were disqualified, although I don't believe even the people with over a million votes cheated.  You didn't need a bot to get that many votes; you could literally click every second.  All you needed were good friends and agile fingers.  Maybe because there were two of us we were disqualified (although there was nothing in the rules stating you couldn't have two people on one submission).  Whatever the case, we didn't make it.  I'm not that upset about the fact that we didn't make it, because I didn't ever expect to win this thing.  But I'm angry that Lucky set up such a terribly run contest in the first place, and then decided to completely do away with THEIR OWN rules.  We wasted so much time and effort getting votes that ultimately meant absolutely nothing.  Shame on you, Lucky, for letting it get to that point.  You could have stepped in at any time and changed the voting mechanism, put the competition on hold, or simply canceled it all together.  Now you can claim that MILLIONS VOTED!  And I'm sure your advertisers loved all that extra traffic (which probably translates to money for you, right?).  And in the end, you're doing exactly what you wanted to do: choosing the winner.

I still love Lucky magazine and have no intentions of canceling my subscription.  But including in your rejection email an invitiation to enter future contests?  I think not.