I'm curious, would there ever be any valid (in your eyes) reason to ban a specific character? Ever since your analysis post, I've been pondering that as a bit of an exercise, but I really can't see anything that wouldn't lead to a sizeable chunk of other characters also being disqualified.
Exactly if I applied every single bit of flimsy reasoning that was used in some of these essays to try to get one character banned it could be used to get basically every other character in most other animes banned. So if I were to listen to them there would be no more polls.
Now the only way I would ever ban a character is if the fandom simply becomes too toxic for me to want to deal with so it's not so much the character's fault. It's the fandoms. So that means it wouldn't be just one character it would be a fandom wide ban because I just don't want to deal with drama. However a permanent ban would be a last resort. I would probably go through a couple timeouts or temporary bans to see if they can correct their behavior before I would do a permanent ban.
But I have two fandoms right now that like to cause problems so I may have to start limiting comments at minimum. So we'll see how they behave over the next week or two. Otherwise I'll have to start something. I'm getting tired of policing their polls because they can't quit calling each other and me names like children. They were the reason I had to turn off anonymous ask in the first place. If limiting comments doesn't work I will have to put them in time out so no polls for their characters for at least a month.