Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-06-26/Board elections

This week, the election results have been released.

On Thursday, the Election Committee officially released the results of the 2008 Board elections. The winner is Ting Chen (Wing), who will serve a one-year term and faces another election in June 2009.

By all accounts Chen won the election handily. He won all pairwise victories, meaning that he would be declared the winner under any Condorcet election method. Even more striking is the margin of victories in those head-to-head matchups; his closest wins were against Samuel Klein and Alex Bakharev, both of whom he beat 56-44%. All other matchups yielded at least a 60-40% win for Chen, including 78-22% wins against Paul Williams and Gregory Kohs.

Notably, the 2008 elections showed a decrease in absolute voter turnout, but an increase in relative voter turnout. This year, 3,019 valid votes were cast, about a 28% decrease from the 4,170 valid ballots cast in 2007, but more than the 2,347 ballots in 2006. Part of the decrease in voter turnout, however, can be attributed to the more stringent edit requirements this year; when taking this into account, the percent of eligible accounts voting actually rose, from 7.9% to 10.4%.

English Wikipedia absolute voter turnout, meanwhile, dropped a shocking 49%. In fact, after setting a record by accounting for 58.7% of total voter turnout in 2007, English Wikipedia voters accounted for just 41.4% of voting this year, less than in any year since 2005, the first year such statistics were kept. No statistics are available for the English Wikipedia's relative turnout.

Chen will take over for retiring Board member Florence Devouard; her position as Chair, meanwhile, will be delegated to another member at the Board's July meeting.

''* Percentage corresponds to the percentage of pairwise vote count won; it roughly estimates the percentage of voters who preferred that candidate over the average candidate. It is not an official statistic, nor does it have any effect on how a winner is chosen.''

^ Where ties exist in margin wins, the tie-breaker is the head-to-head pairwise matchup between the two candidates.