Björn-
The story becomes even more complicated by the fact that Erik didn't mention before phase 2 was over that there would be a "ratification" vote.
International logo vote (Revision as of 00:44, 28 Aug 2003)
Second sentence: 'Individual Wikipedias will get an opportunity to hold their own vote on whether they will use the "official" logo'
In other words, this has been announced on [[international logo vote]] since the first revision. Because an additional in-between step "vote on ratification" for each 'pedia would make no sense, and to avoid having to visit a dozen Wikipedias to count the vote, this has been implemented as a single ratification step on Meta.
Why is this step useful? Currently, the French Wikipedia, the Italian Wikipedia, the Polish Wikipedia etc. have substantially different logos from the original English one. In the second stage of the vote, the votes for the "old logo" were lumped together into one set to avoid a situation where a logo would win whose original designer is not available. But it could be considered unfair to these Wikipedias to impose upon them the new logo because people might have downrated the original one based on the appearance of the most frequently used English logo, not taking into account the potentially superior appearance of the significant logo- modifications used by some of the non-English Wikipedias. This argument, at least theoretically, can of course also be made the other way around -- some people might have voted logo-set 0 down on the basis that they want to get rid of the French, Italian etc. variations, for whatever reason.
As you can see, many different sensibilities have to be taken into account when dealing with such an international project. In particular, we have never really made a decision on how autonomous or not the individual projects will be. Fortunately, it looks like all 'pedias will ratify the new logo.
Regards,
Erik