Advice needed - how to run a user voted contest with out facebook

I want to run a high school senior portrait contest to help get more awareness around here and draw people to either my website or facebook fan page.

However I do not want to use facebook for the voting because of their new contest rules.

I will either use my smugmug account to host the pictures or my facebook fan page with numbers on the pictures then have them vote off of facebook, there for not breaking any facebook rules as far as I know.

so I need a way for people to vote on the pictures. I dont really want to use blogger or smugmug and count unique users by comments since all they have to do is create multiple accounts to vote more than once.

Can anyone suggest a way to collect votes that will prevent people from creating multiple accounts?

Who is voting? If you don't want people to vote from multiple accounts then you need a list of authenticated users who cast unique votes.

This authentication can take several forms. If they are voting from FB then FB essentially provides the authentication (although can one have more than one FB account?). Same with a vote by registered Smugmug (or whatever) users.

If one can create multiple accounts on any of this, then you need to either collect verifiable information proving unique voters (and verify it) or else start with a known list of users. Sounds like the first would be more your style.

If you're willing to settle for a so-so solution that stops only the most blatant vote fraud, you could collect IP addresses. How amny votes are you likely to collect? Can you install a separate vote tallying program on your website? Drupal and many other CMS' have voting modules.

Anyway, you talk about collecting votes on FB and I don't really know what that entails but if you think that will work, what do you still need to know? Just other options?

Normally I would collect votes on facebook by having people "like" the picture they want to vote on. However this is against facebook rules and I dont want to risk loosing my personal page or my fan page.

so voting on facebook is out of the question.

I want the high school junior and seniors to be voting, and their friends. The main goal of this is to get traffic to my site and get the attention of the juniors and sophomroes and hopefully get more appointments on the books.

My website is smugmug and they dont offer many tools like that, I can only upload jpgs and videos, no html or java things. I probably could if I upgrade the account to pro but I dont want to do this at this point and time.

People could create multiple facebook accounts, but they also risk getting in trouble and getting their real account closed and I dont know many people that would risk that.

So Im leaning towards finding a page that lets people register and vote, a free page preferably. I dont know of one though and when I searched I didnt find anything useful.

My host cant do this, but if I could it would be tempting to simply create a simple forum on my website and do a poll in a thread to do the voting. It would be great if one of the local towns had a community forum, I could use that and also get more community awareness through it.

I havent seen any photographer websites that have forums, I wonder if that would be something good to have. It would be easy to have stickies of common questions and concerns, an easy way to show new pictures, etc. And get a few people talking about things in general.

Just did more searching, and it turns out that blogger has a survey/poll built in, just have to add the wedget and questions. I just have to find out if its limited to one vote per computer or account, and if you have to create a blogger account to vote in the first place. You can put the poll anywhere on the page, top bottom or side so its always shown and easy to find.

Im not sure this is the best option but it does seem like an easy option.