@Raphael Thomas Pornin found a potential flaw: the order in which the ballots are presented is not uncorrelated to the order of voting. It's randomized, but not using a cryptographically secure RNG.
@Raphael that's mod-only data
the number of eligible voters can be reconstructed, and the number who voted is public via the badge, but the number of visits isn't exposed
One point which makes me a bit sad about this election is that the two existing moderators who nominated themselves did such a great job that the first and second vote for many of those who vote will already be fixed. So the other candidates will have to live with the remaining votes, which might significantly undervalue their real quality and past contributions.
@ThomasKlimpel there is plenty of room for moderation not by mods. as the mods have repeatedly pointed out. on an SE site there is not a huge amt of difference between high-rep users and mods powers. and low-rep users have many mod-like powers. a major design goal of SE is to "spread the moderation around".
@D.W. "embarrassment of riches"? kind of. suggest looking at average question votes on front page on a daily basis (as a rough measure of site engagement/ "typical quality") before talking about that. sometimes even feel it has declined.
re TKs pt. an election can tend to energize the electorate as seen. more activity in chat etc. would at least like to see non-winning candidates stay engaged in other ways eg visit chat periodically, to increase group cohesion. notice current mods are sometimes highly active in chat over time, and some current candidates rarely or never visit chat.
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Loading ballots from file cs-1.blt. Ballot file contains 6 candidates and 195 ballots. No candidates have withdrawn. Ballot file contains 195 non-empty ballots.
So congratulations @D.W.
And congratulations to everyone, and let's keep working to build a better site!
@Gilles Still, awarding the flag after you stop being a mod does not make sense. Either these "papertrail" flags count (--> award the badge immediately), or they don't (--> don't auto-award it based on these flags when the user loses mod status). Bug?