This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. I've seen this exact same thing happen in hundreds and hundreds of big AMAs.

Reddit applies fuzzing downvotes in big batches all at once, instead of spreading them out. But it gives normal votes as soon as they are given. That accounts for the big swings. It shoots to 10,000.... then Reddit applies some downvotes to keep it in check. Then it shoots back up... and Reddit applies more downvotes. No matter how massive it would normally be, the point of Reddit's vote fuzzing is to keep something from getting to big that it would take days to supplant it. Reddit is designed to drop older content from the page in order to allow newer content to rise up. God himself could do an AMA and the votes would still be fuzzed to the point where he wouldn't even crack the top ten. There's no conspiracy about Bernie, this is just how Reddit works.

The way that you can tell this is true is when an old post is dug out and upvoted. Let's say that Reddit's algorithm puts out diminishing numbers of upvotes. 1000 for the first hour, 100 for the tenth hour, 10 for the hundredth hour, etc. That's not how it works exactly (it's a curve) but it's close enough for our purposes. But if you dig something up at the hundredth hour and submit it to bestof, it will still show the thousands and thousands of votes it is getting, with NO fuzzing downvotes applied. That's how the "Test post, please ignore" thing kept its spot at the top for so long: it was upvoted after the fuzzing downvotes were applied. So if people were to rediscover Bernie's AMA next week and vote on it then, it could probably make it to the top spot. That also explains how Obama's AMA got to be our top post (and kept the spot): because it got news coverage and people kept coming back to read it even after the vote fuzzing stopped.

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Tl;dr: It's reddit's vote fuzzing. Stop it with the loony conspiracy theories.