I accidentally left ANONYMOUS voting on. This allowed submitters to vote for themselves more than once, easily. I checked the IP votes through the "cpg_votes_stats" table and was able to discover the unique IP addresses that had voted were lower than the total presented on the site (http://www.chrismead.com/holidaygallery/index.php).
Total votes for the example image = 2093. Unique IP votes = 107. So, I am going to make their vote total = 107.
Again, I want to REDUCE the amount of votes for an individual picture. I can't take it to ZERO and start over.
So, I thought I could just DELETE individual records tied to the picture number 34 in the "cpg_votes" table until I go to the correct number (in my case, the correct number is the number of unique IP addresses that had voted for the picture).
I was able to delete a number of records to test if this would work and it did NOT. I cannot understand why. I've tried running update.php and all other manner of refreshes...nothing seems to work.
Help! I'm not a coder but play one on TV.
The number of votes and the current rating are stored in the pictures table.
I did find that, actually...and of course right after I posted! Thanks so much. How is the total built then if not from those other tables I referenced. Or is the total updated incrementally by the logged individual records? IN other words, the total only increases as new votes come in.