“Regarding the vote tallies,” Mr. Evangelisti wrote, “we have taken down individual charity counts with a couple of days left to build excitement among the broadest number of participants, as well as to ensure that all Facebook users learn of the 100 finalists at the same time and so we have an opportunity to notify the 100 finalists first.”

In a telephone interview, Mr. Evangelisti declined to give the vote tallies for any of the organizations or to say whether any of the groups that are complaining had been disqualified. Chase’s eligibility rules make it clear that the bank can disqualify any participant.

“We are proud that through this effort we’re giving $5 million to small and local charities,” he said, “raising awareness for thousands of charities and helping them gain new supporters.”

In such contests, companies typically select a group of charities and ask people to vote for one of them. But Chase opened its contest to any charity whose operating budget was less than $10 million and whose mission “aligned” with the bank’s corporate social responsibility guidelines. Organizations also had to affirm that they did not discriminate in any way.

Chase did not create a public leader board showing a ranking of the charities based on the votes they had received on its Chase Community Giving page on Facebook. Instead, participating charities had to go to Facebook to find out how many votes they had received and who had voted for them.

So some participants created informal leader boards. For instance, the National Youth Rights Association, a tiny nonprofit that works to teach young people about their rights and how to protect them, compiled voting data on almost 400 contestants, and 82 of the organizations that it tracked were among the 100 winners Chase named.

The association itself was among those winners, and the $25,000 it will get from Chase is more money than it has raised all year and the largest donation it has received in its 11-year history, said Alex Koroknay-Palicz, its executive director.