Dear Wikimedians,
The 2008 Election Committee would like to announce the results of the 2008 Board Election of one seat to the Board of Trustees. We are pleased to announce that the successful candidate was Ting Chen (User:Wing).
Over the course of the three weeks of voting, 3019 valid ballots were submitted by members of the various communities which make up Wikimedia.
In previous elections, an approval system had been used, whereas this year a new interface and tallying script was developed by Election Committee member Kwan Ting Chan (User:KTC). The election system used this year was a preferential system, whereby voters could rank candidates according to their order of preference. These ballots were then tallied using the 'Schulze Method' (also notably used by the Debian project), in order to find the most preferred winner. To determine the winner, each candidate is individually compared to each of the other candidates, to determine which of the two was ranked better by the most people. In every case, more voters ranked Ting Chen higher than the other candidate than ranked him equal or lower than the other candidate. As a result, Ting Chen represents the "Condorcet winner" in this election, and so is the winner according to the chosen Schulze Method.
More details about the Schulze Method may be found at its English Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method
Detailed election results can be found on the Meta election results page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Results
The Election Committee would like to thank all of the candidates for the time and effort they invested in the election process, and would once again like to congratulate Ting Chen on his success.
Yours sincerely,
~Mark Ryan on behalf of the Election Committee