Concerning the SOTM, I just realised something that might help the situation I explained in the post below, when you guys wanted some input.
http://www.sythe.org/14510866-post11.html
People seemed to agree with me and tried to find a solution. Some people said offsite links, some people other things, ... but we didnt find something fast, easy where the users can vote on Sythe.
Why not voting through pms? When you guys create some kind of contest, users need to send their entry by pm... why not do that with voting? I saw that you guys already did an account named SOTM, so why not accept all votings by pm on this account. Nobody will know who voted for who and how many votings there are on each signature. At the end, you could just count the votings. If you want a faster process, I would create folders for each entry in Private Messages and move the PM with the vote to the appropriate entry folder each time a user pms the account. Like that, you could see, at the end, the number of votes with each entry.

Hope I helped!