Sora was the True Super Smash Fighter Ballot Winner... Let's recap how it was RIGGED

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - This isn't a paranoid rambling. It really was rigged.

Yesterday (though it already feels like such a long time ago!) Super Smash Bros. Ultimate director Masahiro Sakurai revealed that Sora is Fighter Pass character 11... and the ultimate winner of the 2015 Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot. That ballot was a highly controversial web form that Nintendo set up for half a year. In that hyperlinked article, I had an interview with a Nintendo employee who assured me that the ballot truly was limited to one vote per person, but they would not reveal their security measures to enforce this. You can find many people admitting they voted in this ballot several times. Did the security measures block those attempts? We can't know for sure.

There's a fair number of problems with this that I've already documented in other KoopaTV articles.
So I'll recap it in this article.

At the end of 2015, Masahiro Sakurai revealed that the “1st Worldwide*” winner of the Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot was Bayonetta. The asterisk then explained, “Among realizable characters.” The fact that Masahiro Sakurai is now revealing that Sora was the real winner means that he was one of those non-realizable characters, most likely due to his difficult rights management situation with Disney. While Sakurai didn't use that term again in his presentation, it's possible that Sora still lost out to a non-realizable character. We won't know.

Nintendo won't publish the results or allow any auditing. However, like pretty much every election process, there is huge potential for fraud and rigging, including processes that Nintendo has administered before. I will personally admit to having voted for myself hundreds of times in their Which Koopaling is the biggest troublemaker? poll, but Lemmy Koopa keeps getting ahead of me. Who keeps voting for Lemmy? Individual one-off fans? Lemmy himself? Someone who knows a secret side to Lemmy that I don't know? But I digress.

You can see for yourself that the top of the Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot had a Super Smash Bros. For 3DS and Super Smash Bros. For Wii U logo, and the introduction said, “Do you want your favorite video-game character to join the battle in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS/Wii U? Well, here's your chance.” But Masahiro Sakurai later admitted that the Ballot results were used for character selection in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. They couldn't have been used for Super Smash Bros. 4 because Bayonetta was already in development prior to the Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot's end date (which itself is a good sign it was rigged). As I wrote in that article, it's inherently rigged to use the results of an election as a mandate for a completely different context. If people know they were voting for the sequel and not for the current game, you'd see more votes for Assist Trophies already in Super Smash Bros. 4, like Waluigi, that most people would have assumed would've been impossible to implement. They took into account restrictions for Super Smash Bros. 4 that would not have existed in the sequel. That's inherently and structurally rigged.

There were real problems with the Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot, and a reasonable person would be suspicious about Sora's place there. I also don't think a vote conducted in 2015 would necessarily still reflect people's views in 2021. Kingdom Hearts in particular I think has lost some esteem among the population.

By the way, an election could be rigged but that still might not have changed the outcome. The 2020 election was rigged in plenty of ways with the structural disadvantages that were against the then-incumbent (in a similar way that Bayonetta was being developed before the Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot concluded, the early voting schedule was a complete disgrace since that started before the first presidential debate even happened), but that campaign team also made so many stupid decisions on their own that it probably didn't make a difference (such as the first debate being a completely stupid waste of time due to the incumbent's poor behaviour). One of those was putting Mike Lindell—who is now known as an election fraud fraudster—as their Minnesota campaign manager, resulting in a disastrous performance.

Apparently, a fair number of people believe that, six years after the fact (or even sooner), the “real” winner of the 2020 presidential election will be declared, as opposed to the different, but realizable winner. Just like what Masahiro Sakurai did yesterday. I... doubt it, though. Feel free to come back here in 2027 and let me know how I was wrong, though. Assuming KoopaTV will still be around.


Ludwig voted only once in the Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot for Phoenix Wright. For a few weeks in 2019, Phoenix Wright was confirmed as DLC. Unfortunately, after Phoenix Wright's own bit of fraudulent courtroom behaviour, he was disbarred and all of his planned content was removed... and so he never stepped foot in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. That whole thing was a shame. After publishing this, Ludwig then went to vote for himself about 32 times in that Koopaling Troublemaker poll.


Sora apparently wasn't as difficult (from Disney's perspective) as it appeared to be to get into Super Smash Bros.