Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that such polls tend to vastly over-represent the small subsets of those communities who care enough about the issue to vote. Voting is very rare in subreddits so I imagine that probably most users of those subreddits did not even realize that the votes were happening. And knowing how authoritarian Reddit mods usually are, I doubt very much that for the most part they would not have done whatever they wanted…
The people who care are the kind of people who make the community. The community is the content and those who post it, aka the core that ties everything everything together. Lurkers are not part of the community, they might as well not even exist.
To say lurkers shouldnt exist is extremely reductive and callous.