I already provided a link to an analysis that shows how the amount of votes received by users in the 40/50 region jumps fairly profoundly. I have spoken with a witness who moved into the top 50 fairly recently and who confirmed that it is unfair and he receives hugely more votes now he is in the top 50. I can also show two posts from the last few hours where people have tried to vote for me using the steemit witness page and they have typed my name in, the interface has shown that they have voted for me, but the vote was not logged in the blockchain.
If you cannot understand how this is unfair then that is not my problem.
They can choose anyone they wish, even people that aren't in the top 50, can they not?
a) They have no way of knowing who the witnesses outside of the top 50 even are, unless they do significant amounts of research.
b) Even when they do choose someone outside of the top 50, there are at least two major reasons why there is a good chance their vote will fail.
Without Steem, Steemit is completely useless - but in any case I am really only talking about issues in Steemit.com and not issues in Steem.
Several users who have commented on this issue over several posts in the last few days, that I have made, have said that for most of the time they used the system they had no idea how witnesses functioned or what the voting was for - so they just pretty much randomly clicked on names from the list of the top 50 to make up their 30 votes. This appears to be more common than people actually doing research.
They have a way, but they ware unlikely to take it and in any case, whether they have a way or not does not change the fact that the situation is unfair.
One issue, as stated multiple times here already, is that the votes often aren't even logged. The other issue is that the design of the 'vote' button and text input works in a way that is counter to expectation - you type in the name and click 'vote' and then the user's name and a 'vote circle' icon appears. In a large number of cases, people then click the new 'vote circle' button - thinking that they need to do that to vote. The then unvote the account. You can look through the history of votes for probably all of the witness accounts below the top 50 and you will see many examples of votes being cast and then immediately uncast - this is where people unvote accidentally. I catch some of them, but surely not all of them. This is the THIRD hindrance witnesses below 50 face and for no good reason.