It was just a few weeks ago that we welcomed Addison Berry as our new At-Large board director after a very eventful elections process. Almost as soon as we announced the news, we heard feedback via Twitter and the announcement blog post comments that there was strong interest in seeing the voting data. In our transparent community, it only seemed natural to share the aggregated voting data.

We agreed, but because we had not previously shared any of that data publicly, we decided to take it to the board for discussion before doing so. One thing we did NOT want to do is discourage candidates from further community participation by exposing voting data without their knowledge. So, at the 15 April board meeting, we discussed the requests.

The board members were all in agreement that sharing the data is a good thing. The one concern was that because this issue had not been raised before, we had not asked the candidates or shared with them that voting data would be shared. It was agreed that in future elections, we will inform candidates on the self-nomination page that their data will be shared. For sharing this election's data, we went back and asked candidates to opt-in to share their voting results.

So, what we are sharing this year is a first step toward broader transparency around elections data. This year, we can only share with you an image file with data obscured for candidates who did not opt-in. The file does show you the progression of the IRV voting runoff, but we recognize that an image file is not highly usable.

However, the discussion we had around sharing voting data was really informative and actually fun (I love data!). We have already developed a number of stories for the next iteration of the elections module that we deploy, and these will allow us to potentially track and share a lot more aggregate data. It would be great, for example, to know where the votes came from geographically. It would also be great to release the data in a more usable way, like a CSV file. Feel free to share what you would like to see from future elections in the comments below. Just know that we are committed to only share aggregated data and will never drill down to share how a particular voter voted.

With that, it's time to share the voting data. Remember that we use IRV voting, so the image below shows that process - getting to a candidate with more than 50% of the votes (as opposed to a simple majority). The result is that the candidates with the fewest #1 placements are eliminated in each round until one candidate has a majority. You can see the votes of candidates being transferred in each round. Things become much clearer in the end when you can see the final 5 candidates:

• Ani Gupta
• Anonymous
• Enzo
• Michael Schmid (not named, but he is the remaining candidate when the winner is declared)
• Addison Berry (the winner!)

Thank you again for the push to share this data and we look forward to do even more in the next election: