This week, the Signpost reports on the status of the Arbitration Committee elections, halfway through voting phase.

The December 2006 Arbitration Committee elections continued this week. 32 candidates are running for one of at least six positions on the Committee. The elections will run two weeks in total, ending on Sunday, 17 December. It is anticipated that Jimbo Wales will make his selections for the Committee on Monday or Tuesday, and the newly elected Arbitrators will take their positions on 1 January, 2007.

At the beginning of the elections, 37 candidates had submitted their names. As of press time, five candidates — Doc glasgow, freakofnurture, JzG, MONGO, and Voice of All, had withdrawn from the race.

In an interesting twist, Radiant! withdrew from the race on Thursday. However, after Jimbo Wales noted that an expansion of the Arbitration Committee was possible, and that he felt that users who had resigned could re-enter the race [1], Radiant! chose to re-enter the race early Monday, citing Wales' comment. Radiant! currently ranks 12th by percentage, with 69% support.

It is anticipated now that at least six seats will be available in the race, with the resignation of Mindspillage, who was nominated to one of three new seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees (see related story). The other five seats will come from the five positions in Tranche Gamma, where no sitting arbitrator chose to stand in the elections. These five seats would serve a three-year term ending in December 2009, while the person chosen to replace Mindspillage in Tranche Beta would next stand for election in December 2008.

One week into the elections, just three candidates held over 90% support: Flcelloguy, Kirill Lokshin, and Paul August. Two other candidates ( UninvitedCompany and Jpgordon) held at least 85% support, and FloNight and Blnguyen ran close behind, with 84% and 83%, respectively. At press time, Flcelloguy had received just one oppose vote, and Kirill Lokshin had received three; all other candidates had received at least 10 oppose votes. In all, 17 of the 32 candidates held at least 50% support, making them eligible to be chosen by Jimbo Wales at the close of the elections.

The Signpost election guide is still available, and has been updated from last week with new candidates, as well as other candidates who were not able to submit responses to our questions in time for last week's issue. The election guide is intended to be a brief overview of each candidate's beliefs and experiences. More detailed information about each candidate may be gleaned from their user pages, as well as their responses to questions from other users.

Due to size, the guide has been split up alphabetically, though a page transcluding all sections is available below:

ArbCom candidate profiles:    A-F  |  G-K  |  L-R  |  S-Z  |  All  |  (Withdrawn)

The most active votes at press time were that of Can't sleep, clown will eat me (306 votes, 75% support), Kelly Martin (242 votes, 14% support), UninvitedCompany (240 votes, 88% support), Geogre (234 votes, 62% support), and Blnguyen (224 votes, 83% support).

Updated statistics on the election are available at User:Gurch/Reports/ArbComElections and User:Mathbot/ArbCom Election December 2006; the former utilizes the new sortable wikitable syntax, allowing users to sort the results by the number of support and oppose votes, the support-oppose margin, and the support percentage.