Miley Cyrus Leads TIME’s Person of the Year Poll With 3 Days Left

Who will take the crown in our annual reader's choice poll? We break down what's happened so far

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We’re three days away from the end of TIME’s 2013 Person of the Year poll. Here’s an update on where things stand. Miley Cyrus leads the rankings with 20.2% (as of Monday) of the votes, followed by Egyptian Defense Minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi with 18.6% and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan with 18.3%.

Egypt is driving the most traffic of any country to Person of the Year voting, which may explain el-Sisi’s number 2 spot. Erdoğan’s votes are mostly coming from Twitter.

As part of our partnership with Twitter around this year’s Person of the Year conversation, we opened up our reader’s choice poll to social media voting on Twitter using Poptip. Users can vote by tweeting their choice with #TIMEPOY or on Time.com, where Poptip’s technology is recording, visualizing and analyzing results in real time.

We’ve fended off several attempts to rig the poll’s results but the tally of legitimate votes on Monday morning is clear: Miley Cyrus is the front-runner.

Miley fans went turbo on Twitter in a social campaign for the headliner-maker, which two programmers took credit for, but Poptip and TIME’s security measures ensured that only legitimate votes were  counted. That means Miley’s fans really did get out the vote:

[tweet  https://twitter.com/MileyOfficial/status/405505889026965504%5D

[tweet  https://twitter.com/MuneraIsFab/status/405413971991461888%5D

The Syrian Electronic Army also took to Twitter saying they were unhappy with the way TIME described  Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The organization briefly gained access  to the TIME Twitter account through Poptip’s dashboard, but was quickly shut out. The tweet and their campaign failed to move the needle for Assad.

According to Poptip statistics, Assad and Miley were the only two candidates who received more votes through social media than directly through TIME.com.

Assad received 56.5%  of his votes on Twitter with the hashtag #TIMEPOY, and Miley received 95.3% of her votes the same way. Many of her fans returned to Twitter every day to cast additional votes. (Each Twitter/Facebook account is allowed to vote once per day for each POY candidate. The numbers reflect this.)

Of course, as soon as Miley caught wind of her success last week, she too took to Twitter to express her excitement:

[tweet  https://twitter.com/MileyCyrus/status/406204291628945410%5D

[tweet  https://twitter.com/MileyCyrus/status/406202925799997440%5D

Other candidates, like Indian politician Narendra Modi and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, have seen aggressive campaigns on Twitter too:

[tweet https://twitter.com/BJPLucknowBJP/status/407167707348357121%5D

[tweet  https://twitter.com/Lmb115/status/405310823108583424]

A separate portion of the poll pitted candidates against each other in a series of face-offs. In the Barack Obama vs. Edward Snowden matchup, eight out of 10 people voted in favor of Snowden. In the faceoff between Japan’s Shinzo Abe and India’s Narendra Modi, 96% opted for the latter.

There are only three days left to vote so be sure to tell us who you’d choose for Person of the Year on Time.com here or on Twitter using the hashtag #TIMEPOY. We’ll announce the final results of the poll on Dec. 6, and will reveal who’s been named Person of the Year (ultimately decided by TIME editors) on Dec. 11.