Currently the way the Voting is set up it is possible to farm QP's
You can do this in several ways. If you have a connection that is assigned a new IP each time you reconnect it (mobile phone, Dial up, os even some DSL connections) then you can just disconnect and reconnect and vote again and again and again. Collecting as many QP as you can be bothered too.
If you have a fixed IP then never fear, the Web proxy is there to provide you with a similarly rolling IP, although you may need to pay a monthly subscription to get a proxy service that works with the AG website.
Both approaches give access to significantly more QP than a 'vote once' player can ever hope to become through voting alone.
The downsides in game is that such a player can use the 'free' QP's to speed up their ship and avoid being Gazumped on mission signals. They can be traded in for solars or RP to reasearch high level tech faster, or to pay for building lots of high level modules. It creates a masive imbalance between the QP haves and the QP have nots.
Outside of the game, and this is where i think it would interest Emi most is that players that can do this have no incentive to donate / purchase QP anymore. Which is after all how this game primarily generates income.
I understand the decision behind encouraging people to multivote, the rankings on the voting sites drive more traffic here.
My suggestion would be
Make it so that any player that votes on 4 or more sites in a 24 hr period recieves 1 QP. (i say 4 because for me the Oz games site still doesnt work, i can vote there but i never get any reward in AG)
The first 5 votes could provide you with 2,000 solars ieach, The next 10 votes with 1000 solars each and then each additional with 500 solars.
The incentive in terms of Cash is still there, the incentive for all players to do their voting is still there in the form of a QP. Those that can have mutiple IP's still have some incentive to multi-vote but the QP rewad is no longer the driving force.
And anyone for whom 1 QP per day is insufficient now has a much bigger incentive to donate to the game.
.. Oh and while were on the topic of QP Rewards ... How about modifying the Draw so that there is a 1st, second, and 3rd place. 300, 200, 100 QP respectively, then perhapes there is the chance that an active player might actually win some QP
Personally i think a better balanced game will hold more players longer and that will eventually result in more 'real' votes being made on the voting sites and thus generating the desired trafic to the games website.
(heck id be prepared to vote on a lot more sites than just the 5 listed if it would help increase player numbers.