Stuff like that usually happens as a combination of one or more of the following (this is by no means an exhaustive list):
- whale self-upvotes near the 6.5 day deadline
- lots of money used to purchase upvotes from bidbots
- spammer with botnet mass upvotes target post near 6.5 day deadline
- misfired voting trail (so one must be careful when utilizing Steemvoter, Steemauto, or other similar services)
- other forms of reward pool rape
- lack of a mechanism in the STEEM blockchain to recognize and automatically strip bad actors of their stakes
You get the idea. What @mattclarke described is the "polite summary" version. The fully detailed version would be long enough to fill up a book, whose content would consist largely of anecdotes of multiple Steemian psychopaths and thousands upon thousands of expletives.
Thanks for the info! good to know, much better than thinking people are silly enough to vote for such a ridiculous post. I still have much to learn when it comes to the deception of others lol....