Samurai Panda (I believe) translated most of his poll entries for us. If the thread's still alive, you can search for it.
Characters...a reasonable guess is about 40 total, not counting ATs. So far, there have been 23 announced on the Dojo. Of those, 12 returning from Melee. The journal also mentioned that not everyone is returning, but thanks to the Ice Climbers, the question of who (aside from obvious/useless clones like Dr. Mario) is hard to answer. For the heck of it, let's assume that:
a) there will be forty playable characters in Brawl. Most people agree this is a reasonable estimate, despite little solid evidence to support it (correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't re-read the poll blog in a while).
b) 24 of those 40 are returning from Melee. All that we know is that "not everyone from Melee will be coming back," in other words, at least one fighter is getting the axe. I'm not going to debate who, I'm not going to argue numbers, just say that AT MOST, 24 fighters will return from Melee.
Assuming these to be true, there will be 16 new fighters in Brawl. Of those, eleven have been revealed. That means that, worst case scenario, there's a minimum of FIVE slots to fill with new characters.
This is assuming, of course, that the Melee roster is mostly intact. There are other topics to argue about who's getting the axe, and my preferred estimate would actually be closer to 20 returning, 20 new. There are a lot of variables to be sure; this is basically to provide a minimum we can all agree on.
Now...of those few spots left, I strongly believe that Sakurai's poll responses will have a powerful influence over who makes fills them. The good news is that Krystal both scored very well in the poll AND attracted Sakurai's attention in his responses. Most people can agree that she's a shoe-in. However, it also means that space per series is getting quite limited. As of this post, the only "original" SSB64 series that doesn't have a playable character yet is F-Zero. The trend appears to be two reps from the main series (I'm counting Samus and Zamus as two separate characters); the groups that haven't met this yet are (of course) F-Zero, Star Fox, Yoshi*, and Fire Emblem**. If this holds, then (along with the Cap) we can expect a new one from the other three series.
For the record, this whole post has been pure speculation on my part. How many are returning, how many will there be, is there a pattern to who gets in, it's all up to Sakurai. And call him a ***** of the fans if you want, but I'll be ****ed if he doesn't pull something just to mess with our expectations. He could screw over F-zero entirely and remove Falcon; he could fill the game with Kirby enemies and bosses; heck, he could even come out the day before the release and say, "Oh, by the way, the Dojo and the poll were all just to feed you information," pack up his bags and sail off into the sunset riding a pink hippo and giving us all the finger while he sips mimosas in his private island in the Caribbean.
He may want to please the fans, but he's a hard man to predict. Just ask how many people were SURE the Ice Climbers wouldn't be returning.
*debatable, as the roster they can pull from the games is quite limited to begin with. Also, some people still consider Yoshi as part of the Mario series, but that can be argued with the rationale of Donkey Kong and WarioWare.
**I'm counting Earthbound under the "unexpected/off-the-wall/few people would even think about it" group, along with Ice Climbers and (potentially) Stafy. Like it or not, popularity of the series is a huge deciding factor in the inclusion of a character, even more so for two characters from the same series. Fire Emblem took off worldwide after Melee; the same could hardly be said for Mother. That's not quite the point of the post, just clarifying.
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