It was announced that there were nearly 35,000 applicants who submitted videos for Tourism Queensland’s Island Reef Job. It would appear that there were not nearly so many applicants as there were videos. Only one unique email address was required per entrant. Carrie and Jonathan, for example, admitted on their blog that they submitted 5 videos, each emphasizing an angle they wanted to promote.
The same applies to voting for the wild card candidate. The voting process takes an email address and sends the vote confirmation there. The recipient must click on a link in the email for the vote to be tallied. You can vote for each email address you have.
The voting process could easily have problems. Email addresses are free from Yahoo, MSN, etc. Could friends of applicants sign up for dozens and use them to vote.
Even a worse problem could come from web developers like me. I have email addresses for each of my websites. That gives me 30 right there for each one starting with “rich.” And I could create any number of additional email addresses from there. If I were a hosting company, I could have script that would automatically create thousands of new email addresses and process the confirmation.
Maybe it was wise for Tourism Queensland to only have one wild card candidate. The public is participating and that is good for publicity. But they have no obligation to select that person.