The Drupal Association At-Large Board Member elections are designed to engage the maximum number of eligible voters in two ways:

Communication of the ability to vote

To ensure the maximum number of eligible voters are aware that voting is taking place, not only do we communicate this via blog posts and social media, we also use a voting tool that sends the voting papers out to the primary email address of every eligible voter, as stored in their Drupal.org profile.

We regard this as a transactional communication with the electorate, rather than promotional so will reach all eligible voters, rather than just those that have opted in to receive communications via email normally.

Voting system used

Feedback on previous elections using the Instant Runoff voting method, especially with regard to the user interface challenges of having to rank candidates as well as indicate which were and which were not acceptable, has led us to change to using the more simple Approval voting system.

Voters will now simply indicate whether each candidate is acceptable as a board member. It will be possible to indicate one or more candidates are acceptable, then the candidate who the most number of voters find acceptable, wins.

Voting tool used

Learning from the experiences of other open source projects, including the Open Source Initiative, of which the Drupal Association is a member, we use the Helios Voting tool to perform the voting in a verifiable manner.