"You can still help Steem by voting the other the other witnesses and just leaving him out."
That is true! But I think we would all be much better off if most Steemit witnesses are removed. While @themarkymark may indeed be one of the worst Steemit witnesses, he is by no means the only scumbag who has used his power to downvote other members in order to boost his own curator rewards. This is something that many Steemit witnesses (and other high-reputation members) have done, and I think it's time to get rid of them all, or at least as many as possible. Sure, one bad apple may not spoil the whole barrel, but when the number of bad apples gets to the point that its very hard to tell the good from the bad, I think it is better to completely empty the barrel and start over.
I would also like for you to take a look in a suggestion I published regarding Steem administration and tell me what you think.
Proxy-delegation refers to setting another account to cast witness votes for you. But for it to work it still needs for the active account to whom the voting power was delegated to keep renewing it's votes. The idea is to end voting power from chained accounts without an active voter at the end, but it doesn't need to require renewal of the whole chain, just the voter at the end of it.
Another reason why I think witness votes should expire.