Trend charts for the favorite Mario character poll:
Because of the 1:00 AM start and end time for this poll which would affect the FNV and SNV, I handled this by having one less hour for the FNV but giving the SNV one extra hour instead.
Waluigi won 3 consecutive hours over Yoshi thanks to the rally, and managed to tie Yoshi in a different hour as well. The rally was most powerful from 1:00 PM to 7:00 PM, after which the rally dropped off in strength somewhat. Even Waluigi's SNV strength was more than double his pre-rally strength, showing that the rally persisted for the rest of the poll after the rally started.
The rally topic was posted at 11:46 AM. Waluigi was in last place at the time. 11:55 AM is when Toad maxed out at a 59 vote lead over Waluigi. It took exactly one hour to get our first lead change, with Waluigi taking the lead over Toad at 12:55 PM followed by another lead change over Wario at 1:00 PM and Princess Peach at 1:05 PM. That's 3 lead changes in 3 consecutive updates, each affecting 3 different characters. The lead change over Bowser would take a bit longer to happen, and it finally happened at 4:10 PM.
Waluigi's percentage was at 5.85% at 11:55 AM, after which the first signs of the rally start to kick in (percentage increases). Waluigi was gaining percentage for the rest of the poll after the rally kicked in, finishing the poll with 11.85%. Thanks to the rally, Waluigi more than doubled his percentage from his pre-rally number. The rally originated from the Waluigi subreddit and proved to be a major success relative to the size of the subreddit (38465 subscribers right now). The rally topic had 781 points with a 100% upvote rate, although it's possible to get like 1 or 2 downvotes while still technically having an upvote rate of 99.5% or better (which would round up to 100%). The 781 total points on the rally was somewhat close to the estimated number of rallied votes (see below), although the potential exists for people to upvote the rally while not actually voting in the poll.
Estimating the number of rallied votes was pretty easy. I used Waluigi's pre-rally percentage as a basis to determine how many votes I would have to subtract from the final vote total for Waluigi's percentage to be equal to his pre-rally percentage. This comes out to about 750 rallied votes, or about 5 rallied votes on average for each individual 5 minute update that happened after the start of the rally. Even without the rally, this poll would have still managed to break 11000 votes on its own (although just barely).
