Back in 2016-17 it wasn't hard to grow multiple accounts and if someone who had grown even a single account then that person could easily grow more accounts from that single account by sending merits to the new accounts.
The merit system stopped most of those account growing farms, but after checking the accounts that hosemary mentioned I noticed they were from 2017, so they might have got air dropped merits.
It seems like a big account farm to me as there're multiple accounts with ranks over member, and guffie might have more accounts of lower rank like member and he might be using those accounts to vote for the poll.
It shouldn't be too hard to acquire new accounts either. Not long ago I had seen a forum that I'm not going to name, openly selling Bitcointalk accounts, supposedly they were ranked, that's what they were claiming at least. Acquiring a bunch of them to support his scam isn't out of the ordinary. You already see it with multiple alts (mostly newbie accounts), such as the one I reported a few days ago on the AI Report topic, multiple interactions on their thread to create the impression of actual "interaction".
Great find OP and a quite "sophisticated", if that's the proper word here, idea to lure a few potential victims. Fortunately the topic/poll is gone, but I'm certain more will follow, with different names. I'll be sure to be on the lookout.