I have been following the contest ever since I saw the first post by @oracle-d.
Apart from promoting and voting, I have been keeping some notes of numbers in different times of day, since yesterday 15:16 (Greek Time)
INS was slowly getting votes (7.377 at 15:16 ... 9.633 at 23:40) always remaining at the 3rd place.
I was also curious to see how this happened and I saw this

So apparently, that post was boosted. (Nothing wrong with it, really!)

Stemit and Ned himself on twitter did post about it, but on the 18th and 19th of October.. Not since then. The boost + extra visibility would be necessary for the ending day.

I also noticed that no post was done on steemit's facebook page about the contest.

I believe that all communities on steemit & discord did their best into promoting it. But the official Steemit could do more about it.

In any case, all we can do now is to wait for the official announcement votes count (it is a bit fishy to see the outsider getting so many upvotes and so quickly)