Gentoo Elections

1.  Project Description

The goal of Gentoo Elections project is to gather all the people participating in the organization of elections in Gentoo together as well as providing the project with procedures, documentation and scripts to run those elections.

2.  Developers

All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.

3.  Election archives

Elections Results

• Trustees archives with the results of past Trustees elections.
• Council archives with the results of past Council elections.

4.  Elections organization

Election Officials

To ease the process of finding officials to run each election, we decided to create a list of people volunteering to serve as officials in the upcoming elections as well as their credentials and basic information about them. Officials for each election may (but don't necessarily have to) be chosen from among those people.

Gentoo Foundation Board of Trustees Elections

Election rules, based on Gentoo Foundation Bylaws:

• Gentoo Board of Trustees is composed of five elected members
• Elections happen every year starting in February
• There should be at least three election officials plus at least one person assigned from Gentoo Infrastructure project to handle their side of the election. Officials are allowed to vote in the election but they aren't allowed to run in it. They are selected by the current Board of Trustees.
• There's one month for nominations and one month for voting. In special cases current Board of Trustees may decide to shorten that period. Anyone can nominate.
• All Gentoo Foundation members may vote but only members of age above 18 are allowed to run (legal requirement). To run in the election, a person has to be nominated on the gentoo-nfp mailing list and personally accept that nomination on the same list.
• Members who are active Gentoo developers vote using votify script on dev.gentoo.org.
• Members who aren't active Gentoo developers should mail their GPG-signed ballot files to election officials who will verify authenticity of those and pass them to infra so they are taken into account while counting votes. Special care should be taken to ensure the ballot is signed by the gpg key in the Foundation records.
• After voting period is over, all election officials verify results provided by Infrastructure project member assigned to the election and then post them to the gentoo-nfp mailing list.

Gentoo Council Elections

Election rules (based on GLEP 39):

• Council elections generally happen once a year
• The council is composed of seven elected members
• Nominations are allowed for 15 days.
• Only Gentoo developers may be nominated
• Anyone can nominate (nominating yourself is OK)
• Nominees must accept their nomination before voting begins
• Voting is opened for 15 days.
• Only Gentoo developers that have joined the project before nomination starts may vote
• Condorcet method of voting is used

There should be at least three officials for this election plus one Gentoo Infrastructure project member assigned to it to handle their side of the process. Officials are allowed to vote in the election but aren't allowed to run in it. Nominating and accepting nominations should happen on the gentoo-project mailing list.

Condorcet method of voting

For both Foundation and Council elections, Condorcet method of voting is used to count votes.

To cast votes we use program names votify which is by default installed on dev.gentoo.org.

Instruction on how to use votify to cast a vote:

• If you're eligible to vote in that election, log in to dev.gentoo.org
• Type votify --new election-name to create a new ballot file
• Edit .ballot-election-name file in your home directory and rank the candidates
• Once you're finished, use votify --verify election-name command to verify validity of your ballot file
• If everything is okay, use votify --submit election your vote.
• If you run into problems, you can either work them out yourself using votify --help or contact election officials and ask them for help

Verification and publication of results

Verification and publication of results (ID sending, master ballot verification by officials, so on). Also all scripts should be posted and explained here.