DPL vote

The DPL vote is over. I did not win, apparently. Let me start off by thanking the other candidates for running, and congratulating Stefano for winning.

My own results aren't too bad; I beat 'none of the above' by a comfortable margin of almost 10 to 1, and ended up defeating Charles Plessy by a slightly smaller margin. My margin to NOTA was far better than during the previous DPL election that I participated in, though I did end up defeating more than half of the other candidates back then, which I didn't this time around. All in all, not enough to win, but enough to conclude that I might have a chance some other time. Margarita and Stefano were just better candidates this time around.

My own vote was:

[ 2 ] Stefano Zacchiroli
[ 1 ] Wouter Verhelst
[ 4 ] Charles Plessy
[ 2 ] Margarita Manterola
[ 3 ] NOTA

If you run, you have to be serious about running, and support yourself. So I did. After that, I wasn't sure that Stefano would do a better job than Margarita (or vice versa), so I put them at the same spot. Finally, I became convinced during campaigning that Charles has a lot to learn still about what lives in the Debian community, and I am of the opinion that feeling the community is a vital requirement for a DPL; so that ruled him out.

So why did I not win? Obviously because there were better candidates in the election, but the real question is: why is that the case? What did I do, or what did other candidates do, that meant they fared better than I? One possibility was given on IRC:

< svuorela> ol: and "I'm running because no other runs" is also
not a good way to get votes ...

Which is fair enough; but I did run with the intention of winning, and I did try to make that clear. I'm hoping that worked out okay, which would imply that there could be other reasons. I'd like to know about those. So if you voted, and did not place me on the top spot, I'd very much appreciate learning about your motivations for doing so—especially so if you were one of the 39 people who would rather have redone the vote than see me win. Comments on this blog post are welcome, or by private e-mail if you'd rather not see them made public.