This may be true, but if it's true, it was only true very narrowly. The margin between the 4th and 5th placed candidates was 12.27 votes in a situation where 1,188 were needed to win. 

Had that gone very marginally differently, we'd all be talking about how amazing it was that a black African woman had been elected to the Board for the first time in history. 

We can observe a few other things about how it worked out:

- by and large votes did not seem to transfer between Global South candidates - when one Global south candidate was knocked out their votes did not usually go to other Global South candidates

- most votes ending up counting; of 6,800 or so initially there were 6,000 counted in the final round, that is a fairly low dropout rate
- also, if all 8 Board seats had been elected at the same time rather than in 2 batches in 2 years, we'd have 2 Global South candidates in the final 8 and probably be pretty pleased with the results. (Is it still an option for the Board to do this and appoint Eliane, Mike, Pascale and Ivan and then skip next year's planned election?)

Thanks,

Chris