2017 Drupal Association at-large election winner announced

The staff and board of the Drupal Association would like to congratulate our newest board member:

Ryan Szrama.

Thank you, Ryan, for stepping forward to serve the Drupal community. On behalf of the community I also want to thank the 13 candidates who put themselves out there in service of Drupal and nominated themselves. We are grateful that our community has so many brave and generous people willing to contribute this way.

Ryan's election to the board represents the sixth year of elections to a community-at-large seat on the Drupal Association board. Each year we've focused on improving the elections process, and this year was no different. We focused on two goals: 

1. Improve the user experience of participating in the elections process. 
   • We added more in-line help materials throughout the elections process.
     • For candidates, we added information about the responsibilities of a board member to the nomination form, as well as a video message from the Executive Director.
     • For voters we improved the elections navigation, and provided more educational materials about the IRV voting process.
   • We implemented a drag and drop ballot, to make it easier for voters to rank candidates. 
2. Make it easier to get to know the candidates.
   • We updated the candidate profile form, to ask more detailed questions to help voters get to know the candidates. 
   • Based on feedback from previous years, we eliminated the three virtual meet-the-candidates sessions, in favor of giving each candidate the option to post a statement-of-candidacy video.  In conjunction with the question and answer section on each candidate profile, we felt this gave the electorate the opportunity to get to know their candidates at their own pace and on their own terms. 

Our next steps will be to reach out to the candidates for their evaluation of the elections experience.

We also want to hear from the voters. Please tell us about your experience with the elections process in the comments below. Your feedback is important to us so that we can make the 2018 elections process even better. 

About the Elections Methodology: Instant Run-off Voting(IRV)

Elections for the Community-at-large positions on the Drupal Association board are conducted through Instant Run-off Voting. This means that voters can rank candidates according to their preference. When tabulating ballots, the voters' top-ranked choices are considered first. If no candidate has more than 50% of the vote, the candidate with the lowest votes is eliminated. Then the ballots are tabulated again, with all the ballots that had the eliminated candidate as their first rank now recalculated with their second rank choices. This process is repeated until only two candidates remain and a clear winner can be determined. This voting method helps to ensure that the candidate who is most preferred by the most number of voters is ultimately elected. You can learn more about IRV (also known as Alternative Vote) in this video.

Voting Results

There were 13 candidates in contention for the single vacancy among the two community-at-large seats on the Board. 1,240 voters cast their ballots out of a pool of 94,499 eligible voters (1.3%). Voters ranked an average of 3.6 candidates on their ballots. 

The bar charts below show the vote counts for each candidate in each round.
Place the mouse over a bar to see the number of votes.

• Yellow — Votes carried over from the previous round.
• Green — Votes received in this round.
• Red — Votes transferred away in this round.

A candidate's votes in a round is the sum of the yellow and green bars.
Since the green and red bars represent votes being transferred, the sum of the
green and red bars is the same.

The exhausted bar represents votes where the voter did not indicate a next
preference and thus there were no candidates to transfer the vote to.

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Round 1

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Count of first choices.

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Round 2

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Count after eliminating gurubryan and transferring votes.

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Round 3

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Count after eliminating mehuls and transferring votes.

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Round 4

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Count after eliminating zet and transferring votes.

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Round 5

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Count after eliminating Rahul Seth and transferring votes.

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Round 6

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Count after eliminating redacted and transferring votes.

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Round 7

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Count after eliminating MatthewS and transferring votes.

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Round 8

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Count after eliminating Riaan Burger and transferring votes.

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Round 9

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Count after eliminating johnkennedy and transferring votes.

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Round 10

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Count after eliminating jackniu and transferring votes.

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Round 11

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Count after eliminating ok_lyndsey and transferring votes.

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Round 12

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Count after eliminating Prasad Shir and transferring votes. Candidate rszrama is elected.

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Winners

Winner is rszrama.