Wikimedia Foundation elections 2015/Vote Questions

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The election ended 31 May 2015. No more votes will be accepted. The results were announced on 5 June 2015. Please consider submitting any feedback regarding the 2015 election on the election's post mortem page.

Information for voters

Requirements

Editors

You may vote from any one registered account you own on a Wikimedia wiki. You may only vote once, regardless of how many accounts you own. To qualify, this one account must:

• not be blocked on more than one project; and
• not be blocked on the project you are voting from; and
• not be a bot; and
• have made at least 300 edits before 15 April 2015 across Wikimedia wikis (edits on several wikis can be combined if your accounts are unified into a global account); and
• have made at least 20 edits between 15 October 2014 and 15 April 2015.

Developers

Developers qualify to vote if they:

• Are Wikimedia server administrators with shell access; or
• Have commit access and have made at least one merged commits in git to Wikimedia Foundation utilized repos between 15 October 2014 and 15 April 2015.

Staff and contractors

Current Wikimedia Foundation staff and contractors qualify to vote if they have been employed by the Foundation as of April 15^th 2015.

Wikimedia Foundation board members, Advisory board members, FDC committee members

Current and former members of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board and the Funds Dissemination Committee are qualified to vote.

How to vote

If you are eligible to vote:

1. Read the candidate presentations and decide which candidates you will support.
2. Go to the SecurePoll voting page.
3. Follow the instructions on that page.

Common questions

Eligible voter is unable to vote

You may receive a message "Sorry, you are not in the predetermined list of users authorized to vote in this election."

Solutions

1. Make sure you are logged in
2. Make sure you are voting from Meta, you can use this link to go to the voting start page.
3. If you are a developer, WMF staff member, Advisory Board member or a Funds Dissemination Committee member the Elections Committee may not have been able to match you to a specific username. You should contact James Alexander to be added to the list.
4. If you are still unable to vote and believe you should be able to please leave a message on the election talk page or contact the elections committee at board-electionswikimedia.org.

Eligible voter wishes to change vote

Follow the same process that you did for your original vote. Your original votes will be discarded.

Security token mismatch, cannot log in

You may receive a message "Security token mismatch, cannot log in." The developers have not yet identified the cause of this problem. It will usually go away within a few hours.

Given that time is now very limited to wait for this error to be resolved, this alternative is being offered:

1. Create an additional account based on your username with "-vote" added. For example: Jimbo-vote
2. From your main account, post a request on the FAQ's talk page.
3. In your request, be sure to verify that you are getting this error, and provide the username which you created in the first step.
4. Once your vote account has been added to the voter list, you will be notified as a reply to your request.
5. Log into the account you created in step one and you should now be able to vote.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and will continue to work on addressing this error.

I cannot log into VoteWiki

You do not need to log into VoteWiki to vote. If you see the ballot, then SecurePoll has already successfully identified you. For security reasons, only a limited number of accounts are registered on VoteWiki.

Is anyone able to see who I voted for?

No, the elections are held securely using SecurePoll software. Votes are secret, and no one from the Elections Committee, the Board, or anyone on the Wikimedia Foundation staff has access to them. The encryption key for the election is held by an independent third party; once activated, the election is halted. Some personally identifiable data on voters (for instance, IP address, user agent, and other data that is substantially similar to that obtained by the Checkuser tool) is viewable by a select few persons who audit and tally the election (the elections committee) and automatically deleted 90 days after the election.

How are the winners determined, and what is the process once voting is completed?

Voters submit votes using a Support/Neutral/Oppose system. The votes will be tallied and the candidates will be ranked by percentage of support, defined as the number of votes cast in support of the candidate divided by the total number of votes cast for the candidate ("neutral" preferences are not counted, so this is the sum of support and oppose votes) - Support/Support+Oppose. The candidates with support from at least 10% of voters and with the highest percentage of support will be recommended to the Board of Trustees for appointment, which occurs once additional verification of requirements is completed.

How can I verify my eligibility?

Editors can utilize the AccountEligibility tool to verify eligibility in the current election. A number of tools - such as the Global account information page and Stalk toy - are available to learn more about your edit count and contribution history.

Developers, staff, board, and advisors can contact the elections committee via email at board-electionslists.wikimedia.org to verify and setup voter eligibility.

How are eligibility requirements set?

The Elections Committee sets the eligibility requirements prior to the start of the election.

Other question not mentioned here

For technical or vote system errors, please email board-electionswikimedia.org. A member of the elections committee will respond to your email as soon as possible. Please specify the username you are trying to vote with, and the project where you are trying to vote.