Instead of doing a bracket style tournament for the next character contest, I think it would be interesting to see the format of the next contest changed to a Royal Rumble style tournament. Each battle in the tournament would be a 4-way match, with the 4th place finisher of each match being eliminated at the end of each poll. The 3 higher placing characters then move on to the next poll, with a new character being added in, and the process would continue until only 1 character remains. While Link would probably still have a good chance of winning, wait to introduce him and most of the other Noble Nine members until the 2nd half of the contest in order to keep the early results interesting.
I know that 4-way matches are not very popular, but I think they would be more interesting to watch in this type of format instead of a bracket style one.