[Suggestions for improving 2012 Contest]

However, what if a panel of judges, who are not from the ships of the top two or three sims at the end of the year, were to be the ones to decide the winner?

Yeah, this sounds like a good solution -- it's not as much work as having a panel for every round, but it still allows panel representation for the last round!

The only real solution to this is to make the community more active on the forums. If a political candidate, for example, gets a high number of his constituents to vote, he's more likely to win. Simple. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that he's 'stuffed the ballot'. Just that a higher number of people who were likely to vote for him, actually voted. The answer therefore seems to be to get more people to vote.

True, very true! It's not really fair to an active crew that they should be accused of anything when they're just on the forums a lot. There's nothing wrong with that.

But how about a relatively simple addition to the general contests? I know someone suggested something similar already, but: In order for a sim to win any Top Sim round (save the final), the sim must receive at least one vote from a person who doesn't sim aboard that ship.

[Suggestions for improving 2012 Contest]

My suggestion is, go to a panel of some sort like the writing challenges. It is very conceivable that a ship will vote for a character on their ship, with no harm intended.

I agree, too. I don't think folks intentionally "stuffed the ballots," but I know that if my vote had to go to one of two sims, of a quality I judged to be relatively equal, but one was from the Drake and one wasn't, I'd probably go subconsciously for the Drake -- because I know the backstories of the characters involved, I know the writers, and my character has interacted with the other Drakelings in a way that he hasn't with the writers of the other sim.

I also think the best way to get around this would be to have a panel, like in the writing challenges. A couple of high-ranking members could serve (or rotate) as permanent judges, and the winner or winners of the previous challenge could also judge. Whenever I participated in the writing challenges, both as a judge and as a contestant, I found the judging format was not only really fair but also something folks paid attention to.