I have not removed any of my submissions. I can still see my removed submissions and how many votes were submitted, but not the number of views, so no, I am not mistaking views for votes.
I don't care about the karma as much as I care about the research itself. If you feel that you are in the right, simply because a few people agree with you, while I received at least as many positive or constructive comments and about 100 times more submissions on my poll, then I'm afraid I cannot convince you otherwise.
Regarding the definition for spam: this is not commercial. Whether it is unsolicited is very disputable, partly because of the above reason. Another reason is that Redditors in other subreddits sheered me on to make my investigation cover many subs, because they are very interested in the results. So, unsolicited? I would think the opposite. But what does it matter anyway. My intentions are to make an investigation, to gain new data, to share this data with other people and to help people learn new things. Isn't the rule for spam meant for something else, that preys on people, rather than to do good? I hope that you can put whatever satisfaction you got out of your boycott against my poll in perspective, relative to what all the obtained data could have meant for thousands of Redditors that are interested in the research results.