If that's the case then people should seriously look at how those up-votes do because most of the time you have to constantly check and change the timing of them. It's a lot of work. On whale accounts, votes typically do less than 100% curation performance.
Better curation rewards are from up-voting low reward posts that are quality because if they get the up-votes they deserve the performance is well above 100%.
The auto-votes are generally from upvoting services. So the first question is: How many upvoting services exist?
These upvoting services tend to sell curation trails. The bots cast the auto-votes in a sequence. My guess is that the position in the sequence is either dependent on political clout or the amount one pays for the service.
The competition in the auto-vote arena would be a matter of bots controlling a large number of upvotes competing with other bots with a large number of upvotes.
BTW: My voting strategy is to look at posts that are at least six minutes old. I avoid reading posts from authors that get a dozen upvotes at the five minute mark because they are most likely using an autovote service.