That is fair, and I agree with the basic point.
This poll cannot meaningfully generalize beyond the listed options if important candidates are missing. That is precisely why I included the separate poll asking whether the shortlist is adequate.
My main reason for posting this at all was that the old thread has been resurfacing on and off for years, with people continuing to add proposals while others were already effectively “voting” for earlier ones in plain text. At some point, it seemed better to at least impose a little structure on that.
So I would read the current poll in layers:
- The most important question is whether people want an (unofficial) mascot at all.
- The shortlist ranking is informative only conditional on the shortlist being regarded as reasonably adequate.
- If many people think a serious candidate is missing, that is not a failure of the poll — it is one of the results of the poll.
If that turns out to be the case, then the sensible next step would not be to alter the current poll mid-stream, but to run a follow-up poll with a revised shortlist.
So I see this less as “the definitive final word” and more as a first attempt to move a long-running, loosely structured discussion toward some actual closure.