No matter what we do there will always be ways to game the system. The important thing to do is to set expectations and try to give new accounts a bit of an advantage that well-established accounts don't.

You could try to police the system and sieze accounts that are shown to be sock-pupets that only vote for whales or demand a certain distribution of voting from whales.

If whales can't vote for themselves until the very end then it give a bit more of a boost to everyone voting for them. They still get the author awards.

What the whales need to do is to encourage the STEEM economy by getting actual goods and sevices exchanged in STEEM that way they wont have to Steem down and buy another currency to get real value for their post.