I might be banned from SOL for writing this, but I have been paying close attention to the way scores are collected and later posted. In other words, it is my opinion that, no matter what your vote might be, by the time Lazeez gets through massaging it, it will have as much as 1.5-2.0 subtracted from its value.
In other words, if you like a story, no matter what its problems, give it a vote of 10; otherwise, do not vote! Anything less than a 10 is not much better than a vote of 1. If you should think that a story is pretty good, and worth a vote of 8, then your vote will be adjusted to around 6.0 to 6.5, certainly much lower than what you intended.
Without knowing the actual math involved, I estimate that, for practical purposes, a vote of 5 is equivalent to a vote of 1.
The upshot of this is that now I plan to give a story a 10 or not to vote at all, unless I really do think that it is a clunker! In that case, I will probably vote a 5.
To all of those people who have been voting a 7 or an 8 on my stories because you think that is what the story deserves, thank you, but my score probably would have been better off if you had not voted at all.