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The current voting system does not even really measure popularity. If the mud was popular enough, no one would want to divert their attention from it long enough to vote for it. Rather, the voting system measures an aggregate of many factors; popularity is just one of them. Among the others are coded incentives, social incentives from the current mud community, how much the current players desire new players (i.e., incentives from projected mudding community), boredom (voting just for something to do)...and we don't want to forget awareness and knowledge. I voted often for the first mud I ever played, simply because it's the only mud I knew much about, so it was by default my "team." Newbies will likely pick a top-20 mud as the first mud they ever play, so this unknowledgeable competitiveness will be in favor of the incumbents, increasing their chance of pulling in yet more newbies to vote for them.
Maybe the question we should be asking is not "Is it fair," but "What do we want it to measure?"
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