I've seen some very strange reasoning within this thread.
As others have already pointed out, bribing people to vote isn't really a particularly reliable tactic. Every time I've seen it employed, someone seems to spend a significant amount of resources without any guarantee they'll actually win. Better yet, there's nothing stopping the people taking the bribe from simply voting for somebody else anyway.
More importantly, I think people are losing sight of what the voting system actually is. The point is that the community gets to choose who hosts the tournament. It isn't an award for the best build, the most active town, or the group deemed most capable of running a tournament. If those were supposed to be the deciding criteria, there would be very little reason to hold a community vote in the first place. Staff could simply assess each application against a set of criteria and select the "best" candidate.
People vote for towns for all sorts of reasons. They might like the build, want to see a particular town host, be friends with the people involved, belong to the same alliance, like their tournament concept, have been persuaded to vote for them, or simply prefer them over the alternatives. That's an inevitable consequence of asking the community to decide.
I also don't see how restricting voting to a select group of people improves this. If anything, that seems considerably more vulnerable to bias. Instead of having those biases spread across the wider community, you're concentrating the entire decision in the hands of a small number of individuals and then trusting them to decide what constitutes the "best" tournament.
You can absolutely argue that community voting is messy, because it is. Popularity, alliances, friendships and campaigning are always going to influence the result. But those aren't flaws you can remove while still pretending the system is a community vote. They're consequences of having one.
From my perspective, the current system remains the most transparent and realistic option despite its flaws. Everyone gets the same vote, everyone can see the candidates, and ultimately the town that convinces the most members of the community to vote for it wins.
If the community genuinely wants tournament hosts to be selected primarily on build quality or some other objective criteria, then that's a different system entirely, and it should be discussed as such rather than trying to engineer a community vote until it produces the "correct" result.
