The title should be "WMF Board of Trustee elections".
Itzik - Wikimedia Israel, 05/10/2014 09:40:
For example, last elections there were 1809 valid votes.
And this is the issue we should be talking about: the ~99.5 % abstention rate.*
By comparison, the number of WMF staff this days is 218, what makes there voting power 12% of the total voters last year. This consider to be a great amount of power when we are talking about elections (In the last election you would have around 650 votes in order to be elected...)
Did you check how many actually voted?
Wikimedia thematic organizations staff and contractors for example don't have the same privilege to vote only because they are employees of the movement, only if they are editors as well. The question - what make the WMF staff different, and if this is not a little bit problematic that the staff have such power to decide on their direct board, but in general - the board of the whole movement.
This unequality must indeed be rectified. It's not hard to do so. 1) Just remove the WMF staffers exception: after it was introduced, requirements have been greatly reduced and most staffers have at least one merged patch or 300 edits. There could be some minor "discrimination" for some administrative staff. 2) Extend it to any Wikimedia affiliates. This could cause some minor inequality in what different affiliates consider "staff". Mostly, there would be some administrative overhead; but it's trivial to fix with standard electoral methods: publish the electors list beforehand and let interested voters report errors. I wouldn't spend too much time discussing this topic, flipping a coin to pick either option is fine. :-)
Nemo
(*) No official numbers exist... but I already opened one thread on transparency this week.