Debian Project Leader Elections 2025

Time Line

Nomination period: Sunday 2025-03-09 00:00:00 UTC Saturday 2025-03-15 23:59:59 UTC
Campaigning period: Sunday 2025-03-16 00:00:00 UTC Saturday 2025-04-05 23:59:59 UTC
Voting period: Sunday 2025-04-06 00:00:00 UTC Saturday 2025-04-19 23:59:59 UTC

Please note that the new term for the project leader shall start on 2025-04-21.

Nominations

  1. Gianfranco Costamagna [[email protected]] [nomination mail] [platform]
  2. Julian Andres Klode [[email protected]] [nomination mail] [platform]
  3. Andreas Tille [[email protected]] [nomination mail] [platform]
  4. Sruthi Chandran [[email protected]] [nomination mail] [platform]

The ballot, when ready, can be requested through email by sending a signed email to [email protected] with the subject leader2025.

Data and Statistics

This year, like always, statistics will be gathered about ballots received and acknowledgements sent periodically during the voting period. Additionally, the list of voters will be recorded. Also, the tally sheet will also be made available to be viewed. Please remember that the project leader election has a secret ballot, so the tally sheet will not contain the voter's name but a HMAC that allows the voters to check that their vote is in the list of votes. There is a key generated for each voter that is send along with the ack for the vote.

Quorum

With the current list of voting developers, we have: 

 Current Developer Count = 1030
 Q ( sqrt(#devel) / 2 ) = 16.0468065358812
 K min(5, Q )           = 5
 Quorum  (3 x Q )       = 48.1404196076436

Quorum

Majority Requirement

The candidates need a simple majority to be eligible.

Majority

Outcome

Graphical rendering of the results

In the graph above, any pink colored nodes imply that the option did not pass majority, the Blue is the winner. The Octagon is used for the options that did not beat the default.

In the following table, tally[row x][col y] represents the votes that option x received over option y. A more detailed explanation of the beat matrix may help in understanding the table. For understanding the Condorcet method, the Wikipedia entry is fairly informative.

The Beat Matrix
 Option
  1 2 3 4 5
Option 1   110 66 179 273
Option 2 181   78 211 264
Option 3 282 261   278 318
Option 4 127 95 66   225
Option 5 70 81 39 112  

Looking at row 2, column 1, Julian Andres Klode
received 181 votes over Gianfranco Costamagna

Looking at row 1, column 2, Gianfranco Costamagna
received 110 votes over Julian Andres Klode.

Pair-wise defeats

The Schwartz Set contains

The winners

Debian uses the Condorcet method for voting. Simplistically, plain Condorcets method can be stated like so :
Consider all possible two-way races between candidates. The Condorcet winner, if there is one, is the one candidate who can beat each other candidate in a two-way race with that candidate. The problem is that in complex elections, there may well be a circular relationship in which A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A. Most of the variations on Condorcet use various means of resolving the tie. See Cloneproof Schwartz Sequential Dropping for details. Debian's variation is spelled out in the constitution, specifically, A.5.

Debian Project Secretary