Debian Project Leader Elections 2006

Time Line

Nomination period: February 5th 00:00:01 UTC, 2006 February 26th 00:00:00 UTC, 2006
Campaigning period: February 26th 00:00:01 UTC, 2006 March 19th 00:00:00 UTC, 2006
Voting period: March 19th, 00:00:01 UTC, 2006 April 9th, 00:00:00 UTC, 2006

Please note that the new term for the project leader shall start on April 17th, 2006.

Nominations

  1. Jeroen van Wolffelaar [[email protected]] [platform]
  2. Ari Pollak [[email protected]] [platform]
  3. Steve McIntyre [[email protected]] [platform]
  4. Anthony Towns [[email protected]] [platform]
  5. Andreas Schuldei [[email protected]] [platform]
  6. Jonathan (Ted) Walther [[email protected]] [platform]
  7. Bill Allombert [[email protected]] [platform]

The ballot, can be received through email by emailing [email protected] with the subject leader2006.

Debate

Don Armstrong, David Nusinow, Thaddeus H. Black, Martin-Éric Racine, and MJ Ray have agreed to be debate moderators. I would like to extend the thanks of the project for their stellar work in conducting an excellently orchestrated debate, and a professionally rendered debate log. A transcript of the debate is available for review.

Data and Statistics

This year, like always, some statistics have been gathered about ballots received and acknowledgements sent periodically during the voting period. Additionally, the list of voters has been recorded. Also, the tally sheet is also available to be viewed. Please remember that the project leader election has a secret ballot, so the tally sheet is produced with the hash of the alias of the voter rather than the name; the alias having been sent to the corresponding voter when the acknowledgement of the ballot was sent so that people may verify that their votes are correct. While the voting was still open the tally was a dummy one; after the vote, the final tally sheet has been put in place. Please note that for secret ballots the md5sum on the dummy tally sheet is randomly generated, as otherwise the dummy tally sheet would leak information relating the md5 hash and the voter.

Quorum

With 972 developers, we have: 

 Current Developer Count = 972
 Q ( sqrt(#devel) / 2 ) = 15.5884572681199
 K min(5, Q )           = 5
 Quorum  (3 x Q )       = 46.7653718043597

Majority Requirement

All candidates would need a simple majority to be eligible.

Outcome

The winner of the election is Anthony Towns

I would like to thank all the candidates for their service to the project, for standing for the post of project leader, and for offering the developers a strong and viable group of candidates.

Graphical rendering of the results

Total unique votes cast: 421, which is 43.3127572% of all possible votes.

In the graph above, any pink colored nodes imply that the option did not pass majority, the Blue is the winner. The Octagon is used for the options that did not beat the default. In the following table, tally[row x][col y] represents the votes that option x received over option y. A more detailed explanation of the beat matrix may help in understanding the table. For understanding the Condorcet method, the Wikipedia entry is fairly informative.

The Beat Matrix
 Option
  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Option 1   310 123 144 166 341 228 319
Option 2 40   34 46 45 246 48 158
Option 3 230 332   184 233 354 278 344
Option 4 230 334 190   242 365 281 339
Option 5 166 320 124 135   352 240 321
Option 6 20 61 16 16 16   21 73
Option 7 119 275 68 99 117 321   294
Option 8 75 202 53 71 75 301 87  

Looking at row 2, column 1, Ari Pollak
received 40 votes over Jeroen van Wolffelaar

Looking at row 1, column 2, Jeroen van Wolffelaar
received 310 votes over Ari Pollak.

Pair-wise defeats

The Schwartz Set contains

The winners

Debian uses the Condorcet method for votes. Simplistically, plain Condorcet's method can be stated like so :
Consider all possible two-way races between candidates. The Condorcet winner, if there is one, is the one candidate who can beat each other candidate in a two-way race with that candidate. The problem is that in complex elections, there may well be a circular relations ship in which A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A. Most of the variations on Condorcet use various means of resolving the tie. See Cloneproof Schwartz Sequential Dropping for details. Debian's variation is spelled out in the the constitution, specifically, ยง A.6.