Sj stated for the record:
To address one of Angela's points, these posts should not be ones for which one aggressively campaigns for reelection, perhaps not even posts for which one stands for reelection. If they are now being fought over, rather than so undesirable that Jimbo has to twist a few arms to fill seats, then perhaps we should address that issue, rather than opting to hold elections as infrequently as possible.
I for one am very willing to address that issue, but the mechanism seems alarmingly straight-forward:
1: There are people who believe Wikipedia is not working as well as it should.
2: Those people believe that other people are the problem.
3: Those people also believe that the ArbComm has the power to remove the people who are the problem.
Therefore, those people want to be on the ArbComm so that they can remove from Wikipedia the people who they believe are the problem.
As a corollary, some people believe that the wrong people are being punished (eg, themselves) and want to be on the ArbComm to protect those people from punishment.
Therefore, unless we find a way to make one of these premises untrue, ArbComm membership is desirable, and to be aggressively campaigned for.
Note that I believe #1 and #2 myself. #3 is untrue only in that the ArbComm acts purely as a judiciary, not an executive -- we judge those whom others bring before us, we don't bring charges ourselves. One could assume that an arbiter with an agenda might have friends who could be counted on to bring charges against the people the aggressive arbiter didn't like, so that separation of powers is not a particularly strong bulwark against abuse.