Just guessing, but it may have been more "bots" than people?!?!
A lot of these were actual people, it happened right after Gil posted to a dozen or so facebook pages with a link to the EOTM poll. While it was happening, I clicked on the page to view what users were doing and most of them were in that thread. Same thing happened (300 or so people) when he posted links to his Ederville videos. The online tractor community is very large, so if you think about it, it was really only a dozen or so people from each state at a time.