Adressing an unfortunate problem

I was going through the results of the latest color archive poll because something was a bit unusual and unfortunately, even though I took steps a few months ago to deter manipulation of my polls here on Patreon, the probably has once again reared its ugly head. I tried my best to be fair by grandfathering in drawings of patron OCs into the color archive that I had already done, but I found out on my creator back end that some people were voting with multiple alternate accounts. I don't think I should have to explain why this is against the rules.

I have discussed with some of my artist friends about how I should handle this situation. As most of you are aware, I took a break from commissions for a pretty good while to focus on my comic and patreon, and the consistent thing I have heard from my artist friends is that allowing patron OCs in myrewards creates too much incentive to abuse the system to get a discounted OC commission out of the artist and have the rest of the patrons pay for it, which is why I stopped taking the sketch suggestions in the first place. Since the problem of poll manipulation has not stopped, I had to take action about this because letting happen would not be fair to my patrons, and this kind of thing is demoralizing and demotivating for me as the artist.

It's clear to me now that the only actual solution is to remove the motivation for people to put their thumb on the scale. Effective immediately, I've done another purge on the color archive to remove all sketches featuring patron OCs, and I've also deleted the October color archive poll because I do not want anyone pointing fingers at each other over why this change had to be made. That also puts me in the odd spot of what to do about this month's poll since it was not clean. I think the most fair thing I can do is color the runner up, which is the sketch of Iris from Twokinds. I might lose a few patrons next month because of this change but for me it's not the money that matters, it's about the principle of the thing. I am not going to call out anyone, I'm just going to put this matter behind me and move forward.

Again, I would like to extend my apologies to my patrons for the disruption and I hope that the changes I've made will make things more fair for everyone.