The voting is legitimate; there's no evidence that the voting is from sockpuppets or anyone else connected with the team/project. We always monitor the discussion and the voting, and if the discussion is not of sufficient quality, the post will not stay on the front page for long.
Listening to the radio stations certainly gives an insight into the various failure modes. Some of them are just failure modes that any business would encounter once they make contact with the scale of the real world.