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> >> However, the turnout continues to slide, dipping below 20% for
> >> the first time:
> >
> >    Election | Electorate (delta %) | Votes | Turnout (delta %)
> >    ===========================================================
> >    Oct '13  | 1106                 | 342   | 30.92
> >    Apr '14  | 1510	(+36.52)  | 448   | 29.69   (-4.05)
> >    Oct '14  | 1893       (+25.35)  | 506   | 26.73   (-9.91)
> >    Apr '15  | 2169       (+14.58)  | 548   | 25.27   (-5.48)
> >    Oct '15  | 2759       (+27.20)  | 619   | 22.44   (-11.20)
> >    Apr '16  | 3284       (+19.03)  | 652   | 19.85   (-11.51)
> >
> >>
> >> This ongoing trend of a decreasing proportion of the electorate
> >> participating in TC elections is a concern.
> 
> One way to look at it is that every cycle (mostly due to the habit of
> giving summit passes to recent contributors) we have more and more
> one-patch contributors (more than 600 in Mitaka), and those usually are
> not really interested in voting... So the electorate number is a bit
> inflated, resulting in an apparent drop in turnout.
> 
> It would be interesting to run the same analysis but taking only >=3
> patch contributors as "expected voters" and see if the turnout still
> drops as much.
> 
> Long term I'd like to remove the summit pass perk (or no longer link it
> to "one commit"). It will likely result in a drop in contributors
> numbers (gasp), but a saner electorate.

I'd be -1 on removing this "perk" ... I prefer to think of it as
something that contributors "earn" by their efforts.

OTOH I'd be fine with moving the goalposts somewhat to require more
than a single commit. Increasing that to 3 or 5 commits would likely
still result in some contributors dividing that single patch into a
series of 3, but for others might not be worth the effort.

Another approach to consider would be to continue to offer the ATC
pass for a single commit, but to require a little more participation
in order to vote in TC/PTL elections (modulo Foundation bye-laws etc.)

Cheers,
Eoghan