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Board elections

Ting Chen wins 2008 Board Election

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By Ral315


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.

# Name Username Margin wins %*
1 Ting Chen Wing 14 66.78%
2 Alex Bakharev Alex Bakharev 13 60.52%
3 Samuel Klein Sj 12 60.16%
4 Harel Cain Harel 11 57.24%
5 Ad Huikeshoven Dedalus 10 55.29%
6^ Jussi-Ville Heiskanen Cimon Avaro 8 52.27%
7^ Ryan Postlethwaite Ryan Postlethwaite 8 51.03%
8^ Steve Smith Sarcasticidealist 7 50.73%
9^ Ray Saintonge Eclecticology 7 50.81%
10 Dan Rosenthal Swatjester 5 48.46%
11 Craig Spurrier Cspurrier 4 42.66%
12 Matthew Bisanz MBisanz 3 38.90%
13 Kurt M. Weber Kmweber 2 39.64%
14 Paul Williams Skenmy 1 34.09%
15 Gregory Kohs Thekohser 0 31.53%

* 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.



Also this week:
  • Board elections
  • BLP enforcement
  • Global groups
  • WikiWorld
  • News and notes
  • Dispatches
  • Features and admins
  • Technology report
  • Arbitration report
    • Signpost archives
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    These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.
    ==Win and winner== I don't like the use of the words WIN and WINNER here. Can you used "was elected" and "is the new"? Kingturtle (talk) 14:24, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
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