Jimbo has suggested expanding the power of quickpolls to allow banning until such time as the arbitration committee makes a decision. Hence the arbitration committee becomes like a court of appeal.
To date, there have been lots of criticisms of quickpolls, on the talk page and elsewhere. Most of them have been centred around the issue of frivolous use. Jimbo suggested allowing only sysops to start quickpolls.
After some pondering, I've decided I like this proposal. It's reasonably democratic, since someone with a real complaint is very likely to find at least one sympathetic sysop. The sysop body is heterogeneous. And it gives the community a way to take decisive action.
This could be implemented just by posting a policy statement at the top of [[Wikipedia:Quickpolls]], saying that only sysops may start polls. However, I'm of the opinion that simple technical barriers can be used to great effect in enforcing policies. Perhaps we could put each quickpoll in an unprotected MediaWiki: message, then have a list of {{msg:}} tags in [[Wikipedia:Quickpolls]] itself. The list would then be protected, preventing anyone except for sysops from adding items.
Theoretically a user could add a new quickpoll to the bottom of one of the included messages. But if they do that, it is clear to all that they have understood the policy and attempted to evade it. Others may remove the quickpoll not only on the basis of policy, but also because the listing is in the wrong place, and is incorrectly formatted.
-- Tim Starling