At the bottom the writer asks HNers to vote for their submission.

"So this is my appeal to you, the Hacker News community. Please vote for us here (the vote closes on Friday). The public vote is only part of the deal, but it makes a difference. You can make a difference."

Seems pretty much standard to me, not just here on HN, but for all competitions where the public vote (elections included) for people to tell other people to vote for them.

Yes, at the bottom I ask HNers to please vote for us in the competition.

I think where I fail to follow you is where you suggest that somehow that's rigging the vote. How does publicly asking people to vote for you rig a public vote? Where do you think all the other votes are coming from?

I presume from people that are objectively judging all submissions side-by-side instead of by tapping in to the userbase of the fora they are members of.

vodafonemobileclicks.com is not a community site with an existing stream of people - the only people that get there is people that have arrived there through articles like this one, or through tweets to someone's followers.

Ok, that changes matters, but not entirely.

It looks like Vodafone is actually using you to give exposure to their contest. A bit like the 'myminicity.com' website that was crazy popular for a while, with everybody spamming just about every place they could find with links to 'their' city. Only in this case it is your contest entry which might actually have some use instead of a bunch of numbers in a table somewhere.

What they are gauging with this as well is how big a userbase you can mobilize to decide which party is the best at marketing their product in ways that do not cost vodafone $.

And effectively by asking people to come and vote for you, you are not only promoting your own product, but also the vodafone contest and the vodafone brand without any cost to them.

Pretty clever of them.