Cheating's understandable, especially on HN. You only need to get a couple of votes early on to edge onto the bottom of the frontpage. And once you're on the frontpage you get seen by a lot more people, so you tend to get upvoted and stick around for a while.
I'd even say that it's not that sleazy, since anything which sticks around on the frontpage is, at least, obviously of interest to enough people to keep it there. Unless you've organized a huge fake-voting ring, I suppose.
EDIT: I am slightly surprised at the downvotes. :P
I would say that cheating is sleazy even if it isn't at the top level of sleazy. A four-person upvoting ring might not seem as sleazy as a thousand socket puppets and twenty Turkers but, like the gp says, the first is a step towards the second.
The best that can be said is that there should be a way for more-effort to be translated into somewhat more publicity.
If an reddit-or-HN-like-site had a system of "minor leagues" where smaller groups got together, decided their favorite posts and then sent them to a larger group, those who put in more effort might wind-up with more results without the sleaze factor. Of course, then the larger would have to rate the value of each smaller group, keeping things somewhat honest.
There's also the difference between an "upvoting ring" and "I'll tell my friends I submitted something, because I know they'll be interested". Which is to say no difference at all in effect, but a slight difference in motivation.
Part of recognizing that there is a line between what is acceptable or not in biz-dev has to be an understanding that other people will draw that line in other places... it's human nature. Complaining about this is like complaining that people cut you off in traffic, it rains sometimes, or anonymity encourages misbehavior. If you believe strongly enough in how you do what you do, stay busy doing it!
There is a long and storied history of sites 'cheating' for some definition of cheating...
• collecting emails for signups for features (or entire sites) that don't exist yet
I'd even say that it's not that sleazy, since anything which sticks around on the frontpage is, at least, obviously of interest to enough people to keep it there. Unless you've organized a huge fake-voting ring, I suppose.
EDIT: I am slightly surprised at the downvotes. :P