Debian Project Leader Elections 2008

Time Line

Nomination period: March 2nd 00:00:01 UTC, 2008 March 9th 00:00:00 UTC, 2008
Campaigning period: March 9th 00:00:01 UTC, 2008 March 30th 00:00:00 UTC, 2008
Voting period: March 30th, 00:00:01 UTC, 2008 April 13th, 00:00:00 UTC, 2008

Please note that the new term for the project leader shall start on April 17th, 2008.

Nominations

  1. Marc Brockschmidt [he@debian.org] [platform]
  2. Raphaël Hertzog [hertzog@debian.org] [platform]
  3. Steve McIntyre [93sam@debian.org] [platform]

The ballot, when ready, can be requested through email by emailing ballot@vote.debian.org with the subject leader2008.

Debate

Don Armstrong and MJ Ray have volunteered to be debate moderators.

Data and Statistics

This year, like always, statistics will be gathered about ballots received and acknowledgements sent periodically during the voting period. Additionally, the list of voters will be recorded. Also, the tally sheet will also be made available to be viewed. Please remember that the project leader election has a secret ballot, so the tally sheet will be produced with the hash of the alias of the voter rather than the name; the alias shall be sent to the corresponding voter along with the acknowledgement of the ballot so that people may verify that their votes were correctly tabulated. While the voting is open the tally will be a dummy one; after the vote, the final tally sheet will be 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 the current list of voting developers, we have: 

 Current Developer Count = 1075
 Q ( sqrt(#devel) / 2 ) = 16.393596310755
 K min(5, Q )           = 5
 Quorum  (3 x Q )       = 49.180788932265

Quorum

  • Option1 Reached quorum: 339 > 49.180788932265
  • Option2 Reached quorum: 315 > 49.180788932265
  • Option3 Reached quorum: 327 > 49.180788932265

Majority Requirement

All candidates would need a simple majority to be eligible.

Majority

  • Option1 passes Majority. 7.062 (339/48) >= 1
  • Option2 passes Majority. 4.038 (315/78) >= 1
  • Option3 passes Majority. 5.839 (327/56) >= 1

Outcome

Graphical rendering of the results

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.

  • Option 1 Steve McIntyre
  • Option 2 Raphael Hertzog
  • Option 3 Marc Brockschmidt
  • Option 4 None Of The Above

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
Option 1   208 222 339
Option 2 155   192 315
Option 3 137 159   327
Option 4 48 78 56  

Looking at row 2, column 1, Raphael Hertzog
received 155 votes over Steve McIntyre

Looking at row 1, column 2, Steve McIntyre
received 208 votes over Raphael Hertzog.

Pair-wise defeats

  • Option 1 defeats Option 2 by ( 208 - 155) = 53 votes.
  • Option 1 defeats Option 3 by ( 222 - 137) = 85 votes.
  • Option 1 defeats Option 4 by ( 339 - 48) = 291 votes.
  • Option 2 defeats Option 3 by ( 192 - 159) = 33 votes.
  • Option 2 defeats Option 4 by ( 315 - 78) = 237 votes.
  • Option 3 defeats Option 4 by ( 327 - 56) = 271 votes.

The Schwartz Set contains

  • Option 1 Steve McIntyre

The winner

  • Option 1 Steve McIntyre

Debian uses the Condorcet method voting. Simplistically, plain Condorcets 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, A.6.

Manoj Srivastava