At its October 14, 2003 meeting the board of directors accepted resolution 2003-10-14.iwj.6, which details the procedure for extending the board with three new members.

During the period from January 25 to February 21 contributing members can cast their vote online via the voting system. People who become contributing members during this period are also eligible for voting.

Votes will be counted using the "Condorcet" election method system which will be used to select the most preferred candidate. Conceptually, the election will be broken into a a series of pairwise  races between each possible paring of the candidates. If one candidate beats each of the others in pairwise races, that candidate wins.  Otherwise, the "Cloneproof/Schwartz Sequential Dropping" method is  employed to choose the most preferred candidate from those remaining. Some background reading on preferential voting and Condorcet is available online.

As such, vote preferences should be made by ranking the candidates. A vote that simply specifies "X" is does not imply preference. Your preference will be shown best when you specify all candidates in order of preference (i.e. "XYZWTUV").  Voting "XY" implies that you prefer candidate X to candidate Y but will not affect the races between X and the other candidates or Y and the other candidates.