If Debian used Instant Runoff…
The last Debian Project Leader election was a very close one. Martin Michlmayr won a Condorcet-tallied election in a very close race between him, Bdale Garbee (the incumbent), and Branden Robinson. Doing analysis on these result yields some interesting observations. Among the most surprising is that Branden Robinson would have won had San Francisco’s rules for Instant Runoff Voting been used. I can’t say I’m very close to the Debian development process. I used to use a Debian box as my primary home desktop, I wrote one of the scripts that are used to tally the elections, and Electorama is run from a Debian-based ISP. However, I can’t say I’m very familiar with the individual candidates and the differences in their platforms. The conclusions I draw below are drawn from the data itself, and not from any insight (or lack thereof) in any external factors.