The fact people did use bots to manipulate the votes should be enough reason to disregard popular choice as a way to handle one of the jam's prizes.
Even if the team manages to track down the main offender behind this the results have already been tampered.
Viewing post in Rating irregularities
I'm not sure where you're getting that from. If you look at the top winner of the popular vote, they have one game on itch.io (the contest game) and no paid games, they don't link to any kickstarters, and they posted in their thread how much leg work they did to boost their ratings and get more exposure.
Besides, even if someone did have a preexisting following, why wouldn't Degica want someone like that under their publishing name. That following is going to bring in sales. Again though - looking at the winner of the popular vote, that wasn't the case this year.
the top game is one of the odd ones, the langues you see in the comments are not even once english and if its anything where i live, gaming cafe are not a few miles, you have to go far to find it. Itch.io has it recorded as a member since the start of the game jam, that is why we cant find anymore information on the person, he could have follows or such before.
we can see the number of votes on the submission page, its 228 votes.
One channel has 87 views on the video with a subscriber number of of 868, subscribers, not much about it.
I believe the most of the numbers belong to Game Chinchila fans who did not vote because they liked the game but their youtuber asked them to do it. Which is the very thing called having a following.
what's wrong with watching a let's play and then voting for the game? You still saw the game. Especially when it comes to story driven games, I don't see why this is a problem. I voted for several games through secondhand experience, either by being on stream with a friend or watching a video later. I don't think these sorts of votes are the ones people are questioning, at least in my opinion, those are still valid.
yes they are valid but the fans are not real, they were told to do something and left. This is common in Kickstarter, steam and social media post. The people who voted will not return to play the game, they were told to do something by a person and then they had nothing else to do for that game. Some might still be following but lots of the fans are just vote and leave kind of people.