Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2023

The twenty-first annual election for the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee was held during November to December 2023.

Before the election

 * 1) Election Request for Comment (from  (UTC) until  (UTC)) → the pre-election RfC ran for 30 days in September.
 * 2) Electoral Commission Request for Comment → the Electoral Commission was selected across three weeks in October:

Election timeline

 * 1) Self-nomination period from  (UTC) until  (UTC) (8945 days) → interested editors could submit a candidate statement. An editor was eligible to stand as a candidate who:
 * 2) Voting period from  (UTC) until  (UTC) (8945 days) → eligible voters could vote on the candidates, using the SecurePoll system. An editor was eligible to vote who:
 * 3) Scrutineering period (immediately following the voting period) → scrutineers, consisting of stewards whose main wikis are not the English Wikipedia, checked the votes (e.g. for duplicate, missing, and ineligible votes), and compiled a tally of the results. For more details, see the instructions for scrutineers. This activity typically takes 1–2 weeks, but in this case took longer.

Community notification
When voting started, a mass message was sent out to all eligible voters that had been active within the last 12 months and met other criteria. If this could be done within 72 hours of the voting starting, the Electoral Commission could have elected to notify all eligible voters.

Results
For ElectCom: — xaosflux  Talk 00:48, 30 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Results certified by:
 * Note: Results are unofficial until certified by a majority of the available scrutineers


 * 1) --Superpes15 (talk) 00:57, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * 2) --Martin Urbanec (talk) 01:21, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * 3) --Mykola7 (talk) 01:34, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

Election rules
The rules for the election were determined by successive community Requests for Comment. Prior rules continue to be in force unless they had specific expiration dates or have been subsequently repealed or amended. A referenced summary of the election rules is available at ACERFC decisions to date.

Vacant seats
For the 2023 election, seven current arbitrators were to continue in the final year of their term. Up to eight (8) vacant seats could have been filled in this election (including one midterm resignation) for either a two-year term (January 1, 2024 – December 31, 2025) or a one-year term (January 1, 2024 – December 31, 2024), depending on the candidate's level of support. Candidates are appointed in decreasing order of their percentage of support, as calculated by support/(support + oppose), until all seats are filled or no more candidates meet the required support percentage. There was a neutral option; choosing this option did not affect the support percentage for the candidate, and was treated as though you did not vote with respect to that candidate.

The minimum percentage of support that is required is 60% for a two-year term, and 50% for a one-year term. If there had been more vacant seats than candidates with the required minimum support, those seats would remain vacant until the next election.

Coordination
The Arbitration Committee elections are organized entirely by community volunteers, independent of the Arbitration Committee itself. Before every election, an RfC is held so that the community may propose and implement any changes to the format of the election. Any rules or practices that were not specifically changed by the RfC are carried over from the previous election.

Ordinary editors who help run the day-to-day operations of the election are known as coordinators. Election coordinators have no special authority or abilities, but facilitate the smooth running of the election in any way that is needed. Editors interested in helping run the election can add their names to the list of coordinators.

The three-member Electoral Commission is appointed by the community in a separate RfC before the election. Commissioners are responsible for addressing any unforeseen problems that may arise in the election process, and for adjudicating any disputes relating to the election. The Electoral Commission has the full mandate and authority to decisively settle any issues that arise. In addition, while the Electoral Commission itself is not inherently responsible for logistics of the election, Commissioners should ensure that preparations for the election move forward in a timely fashion. As such, Commissioners are de facto coordinators and usually have an active role in running the election.

The last group of volunteers are the scrutineers. Three scrutineers are drawn from stewards who primarily work at other projects. Scrutineers are responsible for providing oversight for the voting process itself. Scrutineers' responsibilities include guarding against abuse and technical errors, ensuring that valid votes are counted while invalid ones are discarded, and confirming that the final tally of votes is correct and certifying the official results. Scrutineers work behind the scenes and are not otherwise involved in coordinating the more minor areas of the election. The Electoral Commission is the liaison between the scrutineers and the rest of the community.

For candidates
Nominations for candidates opened at 00:00 UTC, and closed at 23:59 UTC,. During this time, any editor who met the criteria stated in the "Election timeline" section above could nominate themselves by following the instructions to create a candidate statement on the candidates page. Once the nomination period ended, candidates could answer individual questions on the questions page as they wished. Candidates could continue to answer questions until the end of the voting period (23:59 UTC, ).

For more information about the work involved with serving on the committee, see the arbitrator experiences page.

For voters
Once candidates nominated themselves, voters were invited to review and discuss them. Voters could ask questions throughout the election.

To facilitate their discussions and judgements, voters were encouraged to familiarize themselves with the candidates. This could be done through reading the candidate statements, the answers to the questions put to each candidate (linked from their candidate statements), and the discussion of each candidate (a centralized collection of which will be made available at the discussion page). In addition, a summary guide to candidates was made available, and augmented by a set of personal guides by individual voters.

Voting ran for 14 days, from 00:00 UTC, to 23:59 UTC,. The process was conducted using the SecurePoll extension, which ensured that individual voters' decisions were not publicly viewable (although technical information about voters, such as their IP address and user-agents, was visible to the WMF-identified election administrators and scrutineers).

Voters were invited to choose one of three options for each candidate: "Support", "Oppose" or "Neutral"; and the number of "Support", "Oppose" or "Neutral" preferences a voter can express was otherwise limited only by the number of candidates. After voters entered their choices for all of the candidates and submitted their votes, they could revisit and change their decisions, but attempting to do so would require expressing preferences for all candidates from scratch. Because of the risk of server lag, voters were advised to cast their vote at least an hour before the close of voting to ensure their vote would be counted.