If I may.
The other ballot (the Melee one) was not a write in one. All the choices were predetermined.
A write in ballot would be a whole nother beast.
I was under the impression it was a ballot, and he just organized things later, but by the notes at the bottom you appear to be right. He mentions that 'he left the characters he wanted in the
survey' (but didn't include his votes).
It's very odd to me that he would include James Bond and Alec Trevleyan at all, honestly the fact he even included Rare characters in his survey kind of doesn't make sense to me, but he probably thought it out more thoroughly later.
On topic, I don't know why this would be all that different. He still has to have the results, unless he's just spit-balling and saying 'hmmm well I see a lot of ____ I guess we'll include them' he should have shareable data.
On a different note, I think if they do this in the future, they should go with a multi-vote poll/survey format instead, a lot like the one SG and BluePikmin11 had during the ballot. It's probably the best way to determine characters what characters would be the most universally accepted, seeing that people are all picking out of the same pool of characters, and can pick more than one.
Here was that top 10:
1 Wolf 3.991784914
2 Inkling 3.978438662
3 Ice Climbers 3.88274832
4 Isaac 3.876579926
5 Snake 3.75
6 King K. Rool 3.72417523
7 Bomberman 3.562200957
8 Banjo & Kazooie 3.556962025
9 Chibi Robo 3.353903346
10 Dixie Kong 3.338020552
They let people rate them 1 (worst) through 5 (best) among many other characters and averaged their scores up in the end to see who was most wanted on average. Results here speaks a lot towards our communities perception at the time, on a global scale it was more than likely different, but that doesn't diminsh that it was a great system (though it had it's flaws) and whoever you picked out of that group would've made a lot of people here happy.
In fairness to Bayo she was fairly notable at 27, Ridley kind of shocked me at 22, but the poll is designed to weed out divisive characters, which he unfortunately is.
If the team incorporates this for a potential next game, I think the choices will fair better
on average than the ones we got.