QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Thu 4th December 2008, 7:15am)
While I approve entirely of secret balloting in ArbCom elections, I do not understand why people are so upset about canvassing. It's an election! Of course there will be canvassing!
Just how far up your collective asses do you Wikipedians have your collective heads stuck?
Basically agreed. The issue with canvassing on Wikipedia is in small, localized discussions with a large suffrage base; the presumption is that participants in these small discussions are representative of The Community as a whole (or whatever portion of The Community can be expected to have views on whatever issue is being discussed), and canvassing disrupts that. It would be roughly analogous to juries consisting not of twelve randomly selected citizens but of whoever happened to show up; absent external pressures, you could possibly expect that these juries would be roughly the same as randomly-selected ones, but once canvassing enters the picture that ceases completely to be true. So if Wikipedia's going to run itself on its current basis (and, to be honest, I think its current basis works well-ish for small, localized, relatively non-controversial decisions, though not at all for other kinds), canvassing has to be minimized.
But Arb Comm elections aren't intended to be small, localized discussions. They're not supposed to be decided by a representative subset of The Community, but by The Community as a whole. The reasons to minimize canvassing are completely inapplicable.