This is being looked into by Bug :)

Edit: Nothing looks wrong on the back end. So for the sake of being fair, I'm going to make Bandit a not-so-secret challenger so everyone can battle the bugger!

Yes, the challenger is just available to everyone now for the sake of fairness (thank you for doing that!)

I will leave this bug report open so I remember to fix this for next year. Thank you for the reports!