If for whatever reason I decide to create any other accounts, I'm going to make a post telling people publicly that I have.
At least that way, if I do decide to upvote myself for some reason, people will know it was me and I'll have to justify why I done it.
That's the commendable attitude!
I opened a few accounts last year because I thought I wanted to have one for posting fiction, one for posting non-fiction, etc. I've since decided to consolidate most of my posts into my main account (this one). But I don't think having more than one account is necessarily a bad or suspicious thing. Many people writing bots open separate accounts, including many well-respected whales.
No, and I would not want to make the impression, that having multiple accounts or outlets by itself is anything nefarious.
I think you and your partner's accounts along with your alts are fine, it's pretty clear and you don't make a secret about running these. It's when a user signs up with multiple accounts just to receive more rewards, potentially by self-enforced voting chains, that things do get a little bit questionable.
Even more so if a sock-puppet account is used to pity-fool people for upvotes. Unfortunately there's a lot of this going on.
The way you are reviving one of your alts with upvotes from you or your partner, could be considered self-voting, but that's a debate for the guys in the ethics department. I am only looking for scams and cheats.
edit:I'd actually appreciate if you did self-vote your original comment, just to make this more visible, if you don't mind. Having multiple accounts is nothing wrong - Running Scams is!Will do (self-voting the comment)... this actually brings up another issue near and dear to my heart. @jimitations and I always double-upvote the quality comments on our posts. It rewards people who interact with us and it moves their comments up above the spam and the bot comments. We're working on an initiative to promote the upvoting of quality comments. It's still in the planning stages, but hopefully it'll be up and running soon and I'm hoping the movement will dissuade and in some ways punish spam comments. Time will tell, though, if it can actually do that. We'll see. :)
(btw - upvoting @geke's comment didn't move the thread up, so we upvoted @futuristgear's comment)
Yes, that was my mistake, I should have checked and was under the impression @geke started the thread.