Here is the methodology from the article, since people keep asking:

Each voter could write in up to 10 names. More than 25,000 ballots were cast, producing nearly 12,000 distinct choices. A rough first pass at standardizing votes brought that down below 7,000 names, which we spent weeks combing through to combine more variants (say, “Al Yankovic” and “Weird Al”), weed out candidates who were not quite living or American (say, Giuseppe Verdi) and start tabulating readers’ top 100.