IMDB VOTE TABULATION

Tom,

Many film makers of films with limited distribution share your concern.

The IMDb scheme for rating films focuses on films with a lot more votes than what your short films have received. The measures that the IMDb has put in place to reduce the effects of vote stuffing tends to disproportionately reduce the weighted average of films with relatively few votes.

Weighted Average Ratings

IMDb publishes weighted vote averages rather than raw data averages. Various filters are applied to the raw data in order to eliminate and reduce attempts at 'vote stuffing' by individuals more interested in changing the current rating of a movie than giving their true opinion of it.

The exact methods we use will not be disclosed. This should ensure that the policy remains effective. The result is a more accurate vote average.

There are issues with voting, see here:
https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topi...

However, that doesn't seem to apply, assuming this is you:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2453811/

Looking at the ratings here, I can't see any reason the weighted mean is so much lower than the arithmetic one:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2566298/r...

My guess is that the algorithm has some system for adjusting to vote stuffing - the films affected have a handful of votes and a high proportion of 10s, so trimming off a couple of 10 votes would have a large impact on the average.

Where you have more votes and a spread of votes, the two are much closer together:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903037/r...

My only suggestion would be to get the films out there, so more people can watch it and vote for it giving you a more balanced set of votes, which should even everything out. Perhaps upload them to YouTube and add the link to the video clips section and/or upload it to Withoutabox, IMDB's sister site, which will embed the films into the page. You can then start a thread on it in the short film forum on the main IMDB boards.