We sorta had a snafu with the election - namely we let the election persist into the election phase without enough candidates to actually have an election. The normal process, as happened over on Personal Finance, is to extend the nomination phase for an additional week to attempt to gain enough candidates to reach N+1 candidates for N slots. However, because of poor planning resulting in a singular point of failure, and that singular point of failure in fact failing... we did not extend the nomination phase - and furthermore didn't become aware of this fact for multiple days. This has resulted in people already voting for the candidates - which is a good show of support for the three in spite of the fact that they would all be elected by default.
Still. We messed up. Sorry about that.
What happens now?
We can't simply roll back the election due to the progress it's already made. In order to produce a new nomination phase, we are terminating the existing election and starting a new one. This new one will be starting at 23:00 UTC (so at the turn of the hour). All of the existing nominations are being copied over to the new election, and the new nomination phase will run for a full week once again. This unfortunately nixes all the voting that had happened previously, although the data remains available as the previous election remains in the system.
What should I do now?
- Did you consider nominating but decided not to for some reason? Please consider running!
- Do you know of users who you think would be great moderators, but who have not stepped up? Encourage them to run!
Moderatorship is a position of leadership, but one of the most important aspects is that it is something that comes from the community - we need not just the support of the community to elect them, but also for you to be the people who stand up to the task.
A week from now, voting will begin anew (you'll have to re-cast your vote then if you already voted this week).
Again, I apologize for the confusion and thank you all for the patience you've shown while we've worked to correct this mistake.
