After substantial discussion regarding several votes on the election thread (we appreciate everyone's patience), we have determined that the outcome stands as written at the end of the election thread:
RationalMadman: 19 (RationalMadman, AustinL0926, K_Michael, zedvictor4, Lunatic, Sidewalker, Mikal, Intelligence_06, FLRW, SupaDudz, SkepticalOne, Reece101, Skipper_Sr, Barney, anderwee123, Tejretics, whiteflame, MeowRanger, WeaverofFate)
WyIted: 21 (YouFound_Lxam, Sir.Lancelot, Phenenas, Mps1213, Best.Korea, ILikePie5, WyIted, sadolite, Greyparrot, TWS1405_2, BearMan, bmdrocks21, Dr.Franklin, Mharman, SamStevens, Novice_II, rayhan16, badger, Bones, Vaarka, Ramshutu)
As such, after a hard-fought election, Wylted is officially declared the DART President. Congratulations!
There are a number of reasons that several of the votes were not counted. Several instances of multi-accounting were found among the voters, and those were compounded with those accounts having been created during the ongoing election. In one other instance, an account that had been made on the first day of the election cast a vote. While we had not specified rules for voting on this election beforehand, the efforts by several people to create new accounts during the election led us to making a cutoff. The main discussion over the last 24 hours has focused on a pair of votes that came from voters who had joined the site a few days before the election. We made the decision that, since these accounts only became active on the 18th (including both of the debates they posted on that date and the votes they cast), they would be treated the same as other accounts created during the election. While there are instances of accounts that have been inactive for long stretches of time coming back to vote, they all have long-established track records. Their absences did not invalidate their votes.
I recognize that this will be contentious. I suspect many of you will disagree with the decisions we have made. I'll say now that I apologize for the errors that have been made over the course of this election. That includes anything that came up before the voting, during it, and since it finished. It wasn't our aim to disenfranchise voters; we had to set a standard for voting and, frankly, the circumstances described above were not what we expected to see. We are still working things out that, though we should have been prepared to deal with many of these issues by this point. That includes a clear set of requirements to vote and ensuring that everything is run according to the established guidelines, which demands more time and attention to detail than I could provide this time around.
To improve things prior to the next election, and to improve the running of that election, I invite Wylted, Oromagi and RationalMadman to work with us on a new set of standards that we can use for a new MEEP to supplement/modify the existing one, as well as discussing options for oversight over the election process to ensure that it is running according to the MEEP. We leave it up to them to decide if and how much they wish to be involved, and we invite others to contribute to the discussion constructively.
