# The Election Committee announces the third Steering Committee election
**URL:** https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-election-committee-announces-the-third-steering-committee-election/80221
**Category:** Announcements
**Created:** [September 22, 2026, 7:33pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-election-committee-announces-the-third-steering-committee-election/80221 "2026-09-22T19:33:20Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@ners](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/ners)
#### Post date: [September 22, 2026, 7:33pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-election-committee-announces-the-third-steering-committee-election/80221/1 "2026-09-22T19:33:20Z")
Another year has passed since the Nix community voted in the second Nix Steering Committee. As some of their terms are coming to an end, the community must once again cast their ballots to form the next SC.
## Call to action
- If you are an automatically eligible voter, check your email in the voter list:
[SC-election-2026/eligible.csv at 0df4b05ed03c593edca11a37119bc9504dedfa4f · NixOS/SC-election-2026 · GitHub](https://github.com/NixOS/SC-election-2026/blob/0df4b05ed03c593edca11a37119bc9504dedfa4f/eligible.csv)
- If you are not automatically eligible but significantly contributed to the official projects in one way or another, you may ask for an exception
## Who are the candidates?
See the list of candidates, their statements, and answers to questions, here: [SC-election-2026/candidates at main · NixOS/SC-election-2026 · GitHub](https://github.com/NixOS/SC-election-2026/tree/main/candidates)
There is also an unofficial election browser here: [NixOS SC Election 2026](https://kiaragrouwstra.github.io/sc-election-browser/)
## Who can vote?
The constitution defines a process for automatic voter eligibility based on _the number of commits and merge actions in merged PRs opened by a person in any of the projects inside the NixOS GitHub organisation_. In order to be automatically eligible, you must fulfil _one or more_ of the following criteria:
- authored at least **25** commits
- merged at least **1** pull request
The eligibility window is **the past 4 years** from and to 1 Aug (see table below for exact dates).
## Who can run?
Nominees and endorsers must themselves be eligible voters.
## How to request an exception
People who have contributed to the official projects in a verifiable and substantial\[1\] way may send us an email at [elections@nixos.org](mailto:elections@nixos.org).
- Provide references to contributions
- Specify which email address you wish to use for voting
A non-exhaustive list of examples of contributions:
- participation in official teams
- infrastructure maintenance
- organisation of official events
- maintenance of official third-party accounts (e.g. social media)
- significant contribution to important PRs under overall PR authorship of other users
## How to become a candidate
The outline of the candidate process is as follows:
- Either [nominate](https://github.com/NixOS/SC-election-2026/blob/0df4b05ed03c593edca11a37119bc9504dedfa4f/doc/nominate.md) yourself or accept a [nomination](https://github.com/NixOS/SC-election-2026/blob/0df4b05ed03c593edca11a37119bc9504dedfa4f/doc/nominate.md) by another person
- Fill out the [candidate template](https://github.com/NixOS/SC-election-2026/blob/0df4b05ed03c593edca11a37119bc9504dedfa4f/doc/candidate-template.md)
- Receive sufficient [endorsements](https://github.com/NixOS/SC-election-2026/blob/0df4b05ed03c593edca11a37119bc9504dedfa4f/doc/endorse.md) to become a candidate
Please read the linked documentation for in-depth descriptions of the process.
## Comparison to last year’s election
### Automatic voter email discovery
In response to feedback from last year, we reintroduced automatic discovery of voter emails (e.g. last year’s emails, maintainer list entries).
**⚠ All automatically eligible voters need to verify the email they wish to use in the eligible voter list. You will only be able to vote if you have a valid email in the voters file.**
If your email is missing, or you wish to use a different one, please open a PR to update it.
This can be any email, it does not need to correspond to their commits or maintainer entry.
If using a temporary email address, please be prepared to keep it alive at least until 2027-01-01 in case of technical issues.
If for whatever reason an automatically eligible voter can not open this PR using the corresponding GitHub account, please send us an email at [elections@nixos.org](mailto:elections@nixos.org).
### Same vote tallying system
We will use OpaVote for vote tallying in addition to voting.
We will use STV in order to fulfil the requirement of proportional-representation considerations, and we have chosen [Meek STV](https://blog.opavote.com/2017/04/meek-stv-explained.html) as the specific version.
### Allowing questions to candidates before the candidate list is finalised
We are opening candidate nominations and submission of questions at the same time.
You may ask questions before all the candidates have been confirmed.
You may mention specific candidate(s) in your question at any time after they have accepted their nomination. You don’t have to wait for any other step to be complete.
## Conflict of interest (CoI) handling
The constitution disallows multiple people sharing the same CoI holding a seat on the SC immediately after the election.
As the constitution does not forbid two _candidates_ from sharing the same CoI, we may need to re-tally the votes until a group without shared CoIs is found.
To allow verifiable re-tallying, we will make the anonymised list of ballots public. We reserve the right to use a local open-source Meek STV implementation in the case that re-tallying is necessary.
## Campaigning
Election campaigning in official spaces is only allowed in applications and candidate Q&A - and in accordance to their format.
Campaigning in any other official spaces, or not following the appropriate format, will be considered off-topic and removed.
The EC and the moderation team have agreed to continue this practice from last year’s election.
## Timeline
| Description | Start date | End date |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Contribution window | 2022-08-01T00:00:01 UTC | 2026-08-01T00:00:01 UTC |
| Candidate self-nominations, nominations, acceptances, and endorsements | 2026-09-24 | 2026-10-14 |
| Submission of questions from eligible voters to candidates | 2026-09-24 | 2026-10-14 |
| Exception requests | 2026-09-24 | 2026-10-14 |
| Candidates’ answers to the questions | 2026-09-24 | 2026-10-21 |
| Voting | 2026-10-22 | 2026-11-08 |
## Election Committee (EC)
The EC is the temporary team to administer the election from start to finish. Its primary mission is to ensure legitimacy of the election.
The election committee for this election consists of:
- [@ners](https://github.com/ners)
- [@RossComputerGuy](https://github.com/RossComputerGuy)
- [@iamanaws](https://github.com/iamanaws)
For any questions, concerns or suggestions about this election, reach out to the election committee:
- by email: [elections@nixos.org](mailto:elections@nixos.org)
- on GitHub: ping [@NixOS/ec-2026](https://github.com/orgs/NixOS/teams/ec-2026)
- on Matrix: [#sc-elections:nixos.org](https://matrix.to/#/#sc-elections:nixos.org)
Best regards,
the Election Committee
* * *
1. The constitution defines substantial contributions as roughly corresponding to at least 25 commits
---
### Author:  [@nim65s](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/nim65s)
#### Post date: [September 22, 2026, 7:35pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-election-committee-announces-the-third-steering-committee-election/80221/2 "2026-09-22T19:35:40Z")
---
### Author:  [@nyanbinary](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/nyanbinary)
#### Post date: [September 26, 2026, 10:18pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-election-committee-announces-the-third-steering-committee-election/80221/5 "2026-09-26T22:18:36Z")
Does merge bot stuff not contribute to the eligibility?
---
### Author:  [@miangraham](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/miangraham)
#### Post date: [September 26, 2026, 11:43pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-election-committee-announces-the-third-steering-committee-election/80221/6 "2026-09-26T23:43:34Z")
From a recent change to the readme: [SC-election-2026/README.md at 68a32c95217cb2d09958ab8e03292a09c802e70b · NixOS/SC-election-2026 · GitHub](https://github.com/NixOS/SC-election-2026/blob/68a32c95217cb2d09958ab8e03292a09c802e70b/README.md#L8)
> exercised commit access by merging at least **1** pull request
In other words, “be a committer who isn’t completely idle” seems to be the intent of that one.
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### Author:  [@JulienMalka](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/JulienMalka)
#### Post date: [October 5, 2026, 12:27pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-election-committee-announces-the-third-steering-committee-election/80221/7 "2026-10-05T12:27:46Z")
Tonight from 6pm to 7pm CEST I will host an open discussion about the NixOS Steering Committee. I’ll answer any question or remarks people might have about the actions of the Steering Committee during the last terms and my own within the SC.
I’ll also welcome any (potential) candidate for the upcoming elections to ask any question about what to expect during their future term, etc.
Link: [LaSuite Meet](https://visio.luj.fr/pbq-tumf-bkf)
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### Author:  [@picnoir](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/picnoir)
#### Post date: [October 23, 2026, 5:09am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-election-committee-announces-the-third-steering-committee-election/80221/8 "2026-10-23T05:09:55Z")
In case you’re ending up here from the voting link:
- Candidate statements: [SC-election-2026/candidates at main · NixOS/SC-election-2026 · GitHub](https://github.com/NixOS/SC-election-2026/tree/main/candidates)
- Candidates Q&As: [Issues · NixOS/SC-election-2026 · GitHub](https://github.com/NixOS/SC-election-2026/issues?q=sort%3Aupdated-desc+is%3Aissue+state%3Aopen+)
For the EC:
1. The discourse link is broken in the voting ballot, there’s a `div` in it.
2. Please add these links in the same description. As it is, there’s no easy way to find the statements and Q&A.
3. Last year, questions were collected per candidate. I think it’d be a good idea to do the same thing this year.
@ners @Iamanaws @RossComputerGuy
---
### Author:  [@bitbloxhub](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/bitbloxhub)
#### Post date: [October 23, 2026, 3:48pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-election-committee-announces-the-third-steering-committee-election/80221/9 "2026-10-23T15:48:14Z")
> [@miangraham](#):
>
> In other words, “be a committer who isn’t completely idle” seems to be the intent of that one.
Given the [semi-automatic retirement](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-committers/#semi-automatic-retirement) system in `nixpkgs-committers`, is the reason behind “merged 1 PR in the past 4 years” instead of using all current committers just so that semi-recently retired committers can vote? It may be worth clarifying that in the docs.