Totally unrelated.
Lit runs "sweeps" that remove votes considered illegitimate on occasion. Right now, there are sweeps running for the Earth Day contest, and those always hit hard. They not only get votes from contest stories, but others as well.
( The reason, I suspect, is that IPs are identified as problem voters, and votes are swept across the board for that IP when the pattern emerges, no matter when or where the vote was cast )
The only known criteria are votes from the same IP/ID -- multi-votes on the same story.
It has been confirmed that at least one type of sweep looks for votes wildly out of sync with the average ( usually, 1 votes, which are generally malicious ) and removes those as well.
The rest of the criteria are secret, because it doesn't make much sense to explain what you're looking for when removing votes. That's like putting an expensive security system in your house and then posting a wiring diagram on a billboard in the front yard
