The time-of-day/voting pattern is something that occurred to me too. But the scientifically sound way of verifying this would be to look at the ratio of success

The time-of-day/voting pattern is something that occurred to me too. But the scientifically sound way of verifying this would be to look at the ratio of successful items and the submission rate for different times of the day. This attempt with a single post might falsify our hunch (ie, it might attract the same no of votes later in the day), but chances are that that would be because it wasn't your best post ever...