I know Carlos peripherally through the film industry as a DIT myself, I've seen him help people out, answer their EE questions etc over and over in private industry groups/lists more times than I can even count. Of course he instantly gets my vote. Helping that is the fact he's working with signals higher in frequency than a switchmode power supply on a device that was patented a century ago, but oh well!
What really bugs me is in Nilu's video she states that the induction heater isn't patented and voting for her will open up her world to new business ventures. she's just downright lying to people! Even if she's young that's still really not OK in my book.
And I'd like to address someone's comment from early in this thread that the services offered where you can pay for contest votes are fake scams: some might be, but many (such as the majority on ***) certainly aren't. I've seen them used, the sellers have hundreds of people with real facebook profiles on retainer and they do it all day for a living, and it works. It's $5 for 100 votes or so, you can check the hundreds of positive reviews on****, they certainly get used and certainly works. From the keysight reps response it sounds like they can't even view the individual voting profiles themselves since it's being ran by a third party, but even if they could there wouldn't be any giveaways, it would just look like a bunch of legitimate profiles with a large amount of content set to private. There's a couple interesting papers and videos on youtube about this phenomenon, about the best chance there is of identifying it (and even then only sometimes) is geographically a large amount of the votes will originate from an area/country other than where the winning contestant is located. But even then, that usually isn't considered concrete enough proof to disbar the votes.
I can understand Keysight's thinking that using facebook authentication cuts down on fraudulent voting, but it's simply not the case, and it just makes it a headache for legitimate voters who don't use facebook (as demonstrated by a ton of people in this thread). Depending on the voting services you want to purchase, it can even make it easier.
Here are a couple examples of how easy this is. I can understand if you don't want the links posted here, feel free to remove them if that's the case! A big giveaway to me is there are one or two spots on Nilu's vote history graph where Carlos starts to gain a small lead, and her vote count responds with a quick 100 to 150 vote count increase, the exact amount these services are sold in. Compared to Carlos' slow organic growth over the same time period. I don't mean to point any fingers and it's entirely possible none of this is happening and all of her votes are 100% legitimate. But the possibility is worth considering, especially after looking at the graphs posted.
*******link to voting services removed so people don't start using them************
I know Dave's a really busy guy, but if he did a 2 or 3 minute video on the main eevblog channel pointing people to Carlos video it could help him out a ton. Not just to win him a cool product in a contest but legitimately help out a human being who's made a lot of sacrifices to get into this business and help a guy feed his family who's currently losing to a highschooler who's lying to people about patents in a video. Sorry for the long spiel! As you can see I didn't just create an account today to come try to give Carlos some credit, I've not been a very active poster here but I have been around a bit, and Carlos is a good dude