I am definitely open to the feedback, thank you for voicing your opinion! Keep in mind though that we are balancing for a lot more factors than just the ones you mention. We have to encourage people to vote / participate in the community and I worry if people had to rate 15 other games before they could rate their own, they may just not vote at all. This also means that the few people who are evil enough to give 15 1 star reviews in a row and then give themselves 5 stars are going to be at an advantage + their unfair votes wont be balanced out by the large number of (hopefully unbiased) votes coming in from people who didnt submit a game. Also, by opening it up to anyone to vote, people can 'participate' in the jam to some degree by voting even if they missed the original sign up / didnt have time to create a game. And again, I will remind you that the judges are the ones who will determine the grand prize winner so there is an extra layer of checks and balances there.
FYI Also: I have encouraged Backtrace employees in our internal channels to vote in the jam so a good chunk of the votes coming in should be from them. They are an unbiased, unaffiliated population of ~500 people so that should certainly help.
Anyways, I certainly see both sides of the situation. Let's see how this jam goes and we can certainly discuss tweaks to the process for next time around.