It should be that voting is open to the public!
Viewing post in Does only thoese who joined the gamejam can rate others or what?
I think this approach has a little bit more cons on this game jam because there are not that many participants, so that means people who ask their friends for help or use fake accounts will definitely get a higher position. This problem doesn't occur in the big game jams, just because there are a lot of people and rating smoothes out because of how many votes it gets.
I am not saying this is the wrong way or anything because I am not a host and I have no right to do that. But as a suggestion for the upcomming game jams, I think letting to vote only to those who are in a game jam makes more sense. Also adding a requirement like, you have to have a 10 or 15 rating to be eligible to win, would help too, because some games can get just a few ratings, and because of that, they might end up in the first place which doesn't seem right.
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.