To be perfectly honest, there are many many different possibilities as to why entries may have absurd amounts of votes but no following or no game in the popular games section.
1: It is totally possible to get your friends and or family to play and vote for your game. Naturally friends and family are going to rate your game a high rating because they love you.
2: The ratings of itch.io are different then the ratings for the igmc. This means that the number of ratings in the igmc DOES NOT affect the games in the popular games section.
3: Sadly the peoples vote is usually the hardest win to acquire because to win it, you kinda have to have some sort of following and be a super awesome marketer to win it. People sometimes vote through screenshots without even playing the game. (Please don’t do this.)
4: Lastly, the number of ratings an entry has might be different then the high rated games. I don’t believe there is a way to check, but I think how they determine this voting thing is by the games that have the highest amount of ratings not votes. This means that a game could be given 50 ratings but they all could be 1 star ratings and a game with 20 or so 5 star ratings would do much better in the people’s choice.