I don't see why your accepting nomination should hinge on having 6 candidates. If everyone did that, there would be 0 current candidates. We need all the active and involved people we can get. Plus it would be really nice to have at least one council member overlap into the next term, if for no other reason than to provide an historic perspective on what's happened in the last term or so.

I took nearly 5 days for mine to update once I linked it. There may be a way to speed that up. I'm sure it's just a cron job running somewhere that could be triggered early if need be. We should also be able to look at their user stats and from a quick bit of back-of-envelope math see if they're in the ballpark. The only way it would matter is if they were close, but not clearly in. If they have several hundred posts and thanks, good odds that's enough points on it's own to qualify.

Edit: Just ran Aries's numbers... and they're REALLY close. Nieldk is probably significantly under, but should link the account anyway in case my calculations are wrong.