Isn't the whole point of Mods to make these decisions. If they can't, should they be mods?
At the end of the day not many people will give their true opinion in a public vote+thread. If you could have made a private one, hell even use Google docs, I bet there would have been more in favour of a ban, their true opinion, but because it's public they either haven't voted or voted something else.
We should go back to the MyBB style, whereby you accumulate warning points for reports and such, 3 warning points = limit, 5 = ban - and actually enforce them this time - that might be more effective, because right now deleting posts/locking threads isn't working, and it hasn't for some time.