What I find interesting here is how one voter (me) probably changed the outcome. I downvoted bard at least a dozen times. If I hadn't been so steady, the bard might have won...
I suspect that I am not the only such person, that there are several cases like this where if one person had/hadn't been involved the outcome would have been different. We need more voters perhaps?
I mean, I was constantly working to get rid of the Fighter, and it remained until the "final five." I even missed a few days, during which time it rose but didn't clearly outstrip every other option.
Which shows the equilibrium forces at work here. There's psychological power in being the tall poppy or the "undeserved" underdog. I was also upvoting Bard the whole time, and Bard repeatedly flirted with disaster, only to reach the final three--when Barbarian, my predicted "dark horse" candidate, got rapidly demolished once Fighter was gone. People predicted Bard's demise for almost the entirety of the thread, and it nearly won. I'd say that's good evidence that even with partisans like you and me, things often have a way of working out.
Further, don't forget that there are a few accounts that have never posted anywhere other than these survivor threads and which were created only around the time the first survivor threads came into being...which has some unfortunate implications
much more concerning than "is our electorate too small?"
That said, the way to address your concerns is either to make a "race to the finish" style thread (where scores go
up over time until stuff crosses the finish line), or to use a hybrid of "survivor" and "racetrack," e.g. a survivor qualifying round to limit the number of racers and then a racetrack final round to determine the ranking of the survivors.
