...So, nobody here knows that the IGN GOTY award is not and has never been determined by a popularity poll?
...And that IGN would not put a poll which actually counts towards even the Reader's Choice for GOTY in September, before all the big Holiday games come out?
This isn't a real thing. It's possible it reveals bugs or delays in IGN's data posting system, or how low of activity there is on those in-feed polls that they can shift wildly throughout an hour percentage-wise, but other than that, it's meaningless for even those who do read IGN articles.
(Also, BTW, editorial groups generally do not have the power to change results in a poll. These are automated tools usually provided by third-party services or are generic counter apps embedded in the CMS, and they don't come with special buttons of admins to add or delete counts. An editor can reset a poll to zero, that often happens when a poll needs to be restarted, if a choice was left off or sometimes even from a typo if the counter app is text-dependent, but usually it takes an engineer to do work with the data collector. It'd be easier to set up a bot or promote on social to a specific hardcore audience than it would be to edit the tallies in most CMSes I've produced content.)
