Daniel: your suggestion doesn't reflect the fact that 2014's election had roughly 60% the voters of the year before. We definitely didn't have anywhere near that much of a drop in editing metrics.
It wasn't a "suggestion". My point, more bluntly, was that there are an awful lot of Wikipedians, maybe not all or even many of them people who make edits on a daily basis, but do so regularly, for whom the ArbCom is irrelevant. And that perception would be independent of any editing metrics.
On another note, was 2014 the year we went to a secret ballot to elect arbitrators? Or had that been the year before?
Dan Case