I'm sorry that some people feel that this has become a popularity contest. I appreciate the concern, but I'll respectfully disagree.
I'm going to add my 2cents on some of the things mentioned over the past few pages... I apologise in advance if this comes across as confrontational as that is not my intention.
There is always going to be bias, because we're all human.
It's actually a tough thing to not be bias. Scientists go out of there way to control the bias with their data collection and interpretation. Obviously we're just reading manga here, interpreting Hiro's art/story in our own way. Thus, it is reasonable to expect a wide scope of interpretations.
I believe that a lot of the time the differences in opinions come from interpretation bias or tendency rather than character bias. For example, my interpretation bias is that I generally offensive power and durability/endurance above other things like speed/intelligence/hax etc. However someone else might rate hax or speed a lot better than I do. The same goes for intelligence/strategy, something I believe isn't that important in this manga, but others will disagree. Others might think it's prudent to equate all stats equally. There's not much we can do other than be consistent with our views I guess.
Also, I think some people are possibly mistaking consensus for favoritism. There is a difference between a lot of people thinking the same way and voting for a character because they like them. It's quite possible, and statistically normal, for the majority of people to think one way and a minority think differently. Consensus/groupthink has problems but we're on a forum, this will occur to some extent. And I'm not saying there isn't favouritism, but imo it isn't a huge factor.
Sorry for the ramble. Note that this post isn't about how people should vote or anything, I'm talking about the forum voting/interpretation in a post-hoc way. And there's probably more but that's what I got off the top of my head.
In the end everyone gets one vote, and for whatever reason they vote is up to their judgement and opinion, and thus treated equally. And I welcome anyone who wants to make a comment about how they've seen the tournament progress so far, it would help for future competitions perhaps but it is also interesting to see others views.