Another thing. What happens to K. Rool is a sort of metric for how much sway fan requests will have in the ballot. After all, if K. Rool's popularity is overestimated despite the waves of discussion and survey results int he community...what does that say about characters that are less visible than Rool?
Are we supposed to believe there are legions of dutiful casual casual voters swaying results in favor of characters like Bandana Dee, Shantae, or Isaac? To me, that's unreasonable. I would think the vast majority of these voters would be sampled by the various forum polls, like K. Rool's' fanabse. This is why I find the criticism of fan polls as oversampling zealous Smash fans as overstated. I would think most votes are coming from zealous Smash fans in the first place. When discussing K. Rool's popularity in particular, the criticism that forum polls overestimate certain characters' popularity seems to curiously end with K. Rool.
My advice to those making these comments: Be honest and continue your train of thought: if K. Rool supposedly falls to this swath of casual voters, so does almost every character popularly mentioned.
In other words, even fans of other characters don't support K. Rool outright, they kinda have a stake in our fight too. If the worst happens and K. Rool can't get in (currently indeterminable) despite leading almost every major survey, what chances do characters with less limelight have? If K. Rool gets in, that suggests that the developers are paying attention to the Smash fanbase. If he doesn't, I would be shaking in my adept's/saurian/waddle dee/kong/squid/genie/etc. boots. If the apparent leader in fan requests can't make it in, perhaps fans do not have much of a say in this ballot as we have believed.