Organization Overview

The Python Steering Council serves as the formal governing body for the Python programming language. The council is responsible for managing the Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) process and maintaining the quality and consistency of the language, acting as the final decision-making body when community consensus alone is not enough.

Voting in the steering council election is restricted to active Python core team members. The criteria for Python core team members, as well as the governance structure for the Python language, is detailed under PEP 13.

Election Details

The 2026 Steering Council election was run using Bloc STAR Voting via BetterVoting.com. Bloc STAR is basic multi-winner STAR Voting, and it was used to elect the 5 council members out of the 6 candidates who ran. The full results and BetterVoting configuration are available in PEP 8107, and an interactive results view is available on BetterVoting. 

Voting was open for a period of two weeks, and they utilized BetterVoting’s updatable ballot feature to allow voters to update their vote in case they changed their minds during that window.

The election had 70% turn out, with 74 of the 106 core developers casting votes. This was on par with previous steering council elections.

Most of the candidates were incumbents or had previous experience on the council, and none of them appeared to be controversial. The bottom three candidates in particular had very similar scores. The same candidates would have likely been elected under almost any voting method. That finding is available along with more detailed analysis on the Python forum.   

How they chose STAR Voting 

This was the first steering council election using STAR Voting. The council had previously been using Approval voting on the Helios platform since their first election in 2019. 

In 2024, the community began discussing alternatives to Approval since they wanted more expression for the voters, more nuanced feedback for the candidates, and more resilience to strategic voting. After deliberation, they selected Bloc STAR as the best option, and it was formally adopted into PEP 13 (essentially their bylaws) after a poll of 51 core developers showed 92% being in favor of the change. 

At the end of 2024, the community began searching for a provider, and BetterVoting.com arose as the only online elections platform to meet their requirements for security and anonymity. Updatable ballots was the only required feature that BetterVoting lacked, but luckily, there was enough notice for the BetterVoting team to have the feature implemented before the election. 

The election ran smoothly, and a poll of 30 core developers showed 87% preferred the STAR Voting experience over Approval Voting, with 10% having no preference. None of the poll participants preferred the previous platform; all either preferred BetterVoting.com or had No Preference. 

Conclusion

STAR Voting on BetterVoting.com succeeded by all metrics. The election wasn’t super competitive, and that’s actually ideal as it gave voters a chance to get comfortable with experience and build trust with the voting method before any contentious elections come up. That may just happen sooner or later. STAR will continue to be used for the foreseeable Steering Council elections as it’s been formally adopted in PEP 13, and STAR Voting has already been proposed as an upgrade for Python Software Foundation (PSF) board elections. PSF board elections tend to feature more candidates and be more competitive than the steering council elections.