The messed up part about SE using Twitter as a contest platform is for the players that didn't previously have a Twitter account and created one for the contest.

Their entries were not showing up in the hashtag searches; it's something to do with how Twitter handles spam prevention/new accounts. There was a Twitter question to SE about it that never got a response so it will be interesting to see if any of the new accounts are chosen as winners or if they were just completely SOL.