In the event that people are unaware of the specifics of the e-sports runner 5-character selection poll posted earlier on this page, it's to decide who gets 100 votes added to the actual Xrd character poll and who gets 10 votes added. First place in that web poll gets 100 votes while second gets 10. Additionally, you can vote once every hour. So over the course of 24 hours, a single person (excluding any proxies or VPNs), can give potentially 120 online votes for a mix of characters in this online poll (which again, will translate to 100 proper votes for the winner, and 10 proper votes for the runner up). So while this may not potentially mean much for the characters outside the top 4 (HOS, Baiken, Dizzy, Bridget I believe?), it can possibly shift things once the poll ends since I believe HOS and Baiken (I forget who the second place was at the update) were only 400 votes apart or so.
As for why people like Bridget, well, similar to why people like Baiken/Dizzy, it's not entirely for the gameplay. I believe Abegen on twitter even said he was giving all his votes to Bridget just so he could see more Bridget doujins.