Observations on the 2025 Steering Council election results

Congratulations to the winners, and gratitude to all who ran!

Here’s a breakdown of the distribution of approvals:

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363 approvals

Pablo Galindo Salgado     63  17.4%
Barry Warsaw              58  16.0%
Emily Morehouse           52  14.3%
Gregory P. Smith          50  13.8%
Donghee Na                48  13.2%

Thomas Wouters            38  10.5%
Ethan Furman              31   8.5%
Mariatta                  23   6.3%
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A curiosity is that, despite that there are 5 winners, voters averaged less than 5[1] approvals per ballot.

The distribution of hearts across nomination statements is a very crude form of “block approval” polling. Those being “polled” then are self-selected, not anonymous, and may not even be eligible to vote. Nevertheless, in this specific election, 4 of the winners would have been the same:

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232 hearts

Pablo Galindo Salgado     42  18.1%
Barry Warsaw              37  15.9%
Donghee Na                29  12.5%
Emily Morehouse           28  12.1%
Thomas Wouters            26  11.2%

Ethan Furman              25  10.8%
Gregory P. Smith          25  10.8%
Mariatta                  20   8.6%
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The most interesting question to me can’t be answered: would some form of “proportional approval” have changed results? That can’t be known without access to the ballots for detailed analysis.


  1. as @pitrou pointed out, there were 76 ballots cast, and 363/76 ~= 4.8 ↩︎

7 Likes

You mean “less than 5”? There were 76 ballots cast, which results in an average of ~4.78 approvals per ballot.

2 Likes

One interpretation of that is that people voted for “any steering council as long as $MY_TWO_STRONG_PREFERENCES are on it”.

That being said, there’s no way to know if most people voted for 4 candidates or there were people voting for just 1 person while others voted for (almost) everybody.

4 Likes

It’s simply impossible to know without having the ballots (which cannot be gotten from Helios).

While a “curiosity”, it’s not alarming. Just interesting (well, to me).