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Who should vote in Fedora elections?
Creating fair governance models for open-source projects is not easy; defining criteria for participants to receive membership and voting rights is a particularly thorny problem for projects that have elections for representative bodies. The Fedora Council, the project's top-level governance body, is wrestling with that conundrum now. This was triggered by a Fedora special-interest group (SIG) granting temporary membership to at least one person for the sole purpose of allowing them to vote in the most recent Fedora Engineering Steering Council (FESCo) election. That opened a large can of worms about what it means to be a contributor and how contributors can be identified for voting purposes.
Fedora's elections are held after each release cycle; for example, the most recent was the FESCo Fedora 43 election, which ran from December 17, 2025 to January 7, 2026. It is not a high bar to be eligible to vote in a FESCo election. First, one must have membership in the "cla_done" group; that is available to anyone who has a Fedora account (which requires agreeing to the Code of Conduct) and has signed the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement. Secondly, a person must be a member of an additional group unrelated to the cla_done group. That could be membership in any of the eligible Fedora groups, and there are literally hundreds of Fedora groups that fit the bill. It is not difficult at all for someone who is active in the Fedora community in some fashion to gain membership to a group that would allow them to vote in an election.