3.2.3. Voting

Even though Debian isn’t really a democracy, we use a democratic process to elect our leaders and to approve general resolutions. These procedures are defined by the Debian Constitution.

Other than the yearly leader election, votes are not routinely held, and they are not undertaken lightly. Each proposal is first discussed on the debian-vote@lists.debian.org mailing list and it requires several endorsements before the project secretary starts the voting procedure.

You don’t have to track the pre-vote discussions, as the secretary will issue several calls for votes on debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org (and all developers are expected to be subscribed to that list). Democracy doesn’t work well if people don’t take part in the vote, which is why we encourage all developers to vote. Voting is conducted via GPG-signed/encrypted email messages.

The list of all proposals (past and current) is available on the Debian Voting Information page, along with information on how to make, second and vote on proposals.