Operation Rainfall was started as a campaign for Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story, and Pandora's Tower to get localized and they all did.
Yes, I know who they are and I bought the trilogy of Wii JRPGs.
The difference is that while Nintendo seems to be okay with tossing scraps to Xseed, Sega is known to hoard its Japanese games and refuse to license them to anyone.
Part of it is a localization company has offered a discount for localizing whatever game wins the poll. I don't know what they've worked on so I don't know how good they are, but it's a little more than a random poll on a random website. Obviously Sega still has to want to shell out for the localization and use that company to do it.
Sure, I saw that too, but... I dunno, I mean, what if 8-4 came out and said, "we'll do a Sega game for free!" - would that matter to anyone making the calls in Japan?
As I said, there's the VC3 localization that is apparently all but done, and some localization companies buy/take/license/whatever fan translations, so the cost of localizing VC3 is probably negligible. But I don't know if they're interested.
Heck, in the same way that Nintendo could just grab that Mother 3 translation - which the translator has offered! - patch the rom, and then slap it up on VC for like 15 bucks but they just don't want to do it for whatever reason.