The Bitcoin Foundation recently announced to conduct a runoff election for its two individual board seats, as previous ballot failed to designate a clear winner.
The results somewhat contradicted with one of the Bitcoin Foundation’s bylaws that requires candidates to obtain at least 50% approval in order to qualify for the board seat. As per one list published on the foundation’s blog, the top contender — Olivier Janssens — managed to secure around 46.7% approval, followed by Jim Harper, Bruce Fenton and Michael Perkily who ended up securing 41.2%, 30.9%, and 30% approval rate, respectively.
“Given that none of the candidates received at least 50% of the vote, we will be holding a runoff election for the two individual board seats,” the Bitcoin Foundation Marketing Director Jinyoung Lee Englund said. “The four [aforementioned] candidates that received the most number of votes will be available for selection in this runoff election.”
Candidates were Already Concerned
A few days before the results, the Bitcoin Foundation candidates had also exhibited their concerns over the low voter turnout. They briefly criticized the organization absenteeism when it came to encourage the eligible voters to participate in the election. According to the available sources, the Bitcoin Foundation only relied on its local message board and email campaign when it came to updating voters about the account activation requirements.
“The requirement to activate accounts,” said Fenton, “was not announced on the Bitcoin Foundation home page (nor was the election itself!) or on Reddit or on Bitcoin Talk, two of the most popular industry news sources.”
As a result, only 13% of the total 1,523 voters turned up for the election.
Registration Reopened
The criticism somewhat influenced the Bitcoin Foundation to reopen registrations for the upcoming runoff elections. It will be open today and be available through Monday, February 23, 2015 at 11:59pm EST.
The runoff election will be held between February 24 and 28.