Thank you for your words @Govmos.
If you have specific insights or recommendations as to how we can have a fairer, smoother election process next go around, please consider contributing your thoughts here:
From my perspective, allowing validators to self police conflicts of interest was an error. Conflicts are not a matter of interpretation. There are objective standards that help us identify when conflicts exist, and several validators voted with preference despite material conflicts existing.
Abuse of vote options for bias signaling was also an issue – and we should explore ways an election supervisor can mitigate bad behavior, or ways this can be neutralized via changes in code.
Others have said the process by which candidates were shortlisted was not sufficiently democratic and or transparent.
It would be good to organize our collective thoughts while the experience is still fresh.
If we are to have meaningful accountability, we need to figure out how to do elections better – and while having multiple choice options implemented in gov module will help, it doesn’t solve for all the procedural and process issues that arise in an election environment.