As @schrosct mentions, these are likely to be a curation trail. I get a stream of these votes from @thesteemengine when I'm mentioned in their newsletter. I to have had the option to subscribe to this and be one of those small voters although I havent done it yet.

They recommend you use around 1% vote as there may be many articles to vote up, this is to stop your VP from draining too much. If they were immediately followed by a whale vote, then that's probably what this is.