It's a volunteer appointment by SoE. It is what it is.
Having it be a voted position would be equally potentially worthless. If they do a poll/vote on a message board, you'll have a very skewed miniscule subset of the Beastlord community voting on it - heavy majority high end raiders. If they do a vote through the game somehow, you'll have a bunch of people voting on people based upon nothing - nobody will know who virtually anybody on the list is.
I never liked the appointment method before, but it's their game, their correspondent. It's not like the person has any 'authority' at all - they're just a messenger. They're looking for somebody sensible and intelligent - something different than looked for by many in the community (look at politics!).
I just hope they're an anal parsing mad(wo)man!