My apologies. Didn't mean to imply you were judging us. You said yourself people shouldn't be harsh. I didn't feel judged by you. I realized how it might look to others and that other projects might look unfairly suspicious. The stats are essential. But wanted to make sure other site users considered the possibility that admin votes weren't decided by the admin alone on projects before judging their voting patterns. If unsure, it's good to ask what system is used. I'm sure others have a process similar to ours. It felt wrong to our community to exclude active contributing members from benefitting from the community power, so we tried to set up a simple safeguard. I've manned the block account myself on occasion and hitting the upvote on my own feels creepy, but it's a signal from others in the community.

I wish steemauto had an "exclude self" option in curation trails as well, since that adds true self votes.