Sometimes I hear that voting in FFmpeg is worse than in North Korea. Obviously people don’t know much about voting in North Korea or they wouldn’t make such statements. Here I shall try to have a short overview on voting in two similar yet different Asian countries and compare it to FFmpeg. My knowledge about North Korea comes from posts of Russian researchers, at least one of them lives in Korea and their information looks legit to me (because it lacks political agenda and has even small details mentioned that correlate well with other information from people visiting DPRK). For the other country it’s various sources not from state media (because such information is often omitted there or you hear simply outright lies). For FFmpeg I obviously have my own experience and observations from their mailing list.
North Korea
Maybe the main reason why it makes people think about FFmpeg is the fact they claim sovereignty over the whole Korean peninsula and even appoints special people to do merges govern over regions still under occupation and even promotes them time from time. South Korea actually does the same except for useless staff but they recognize people with North Korean passports as their own citizens.
Anyway, voting. The system is rather simple: you have one candidate per region and all people vote for him. The ruling member of Kim family should get 100% support in his region (around Paektu Mountain if you forgot that)—and 100% means that all voters should come and vote (I guess it’s obvious how). In other regions some voters may skip it in case they are very ill. I don’t remember whether they can vote against but it’s rather unthinkable too. There’s a story about North Koreans fleeing to China and seeing a demonstration in South Korea on the TV—their reaction was “Why do they allow it?! How can the President run such a country?!”. So people there are quite well conditioned and voting goes smooth.
Russia
This is a country with a variety of approaches to voting—some elections nobody cares about and they can be even fair (until an inappropriate candidate is elected and then they have to correct it), some elections try to keep an image of honesty in order to show outsiders that the system works fine and elected candidates are legitimate (in that case they simply try not to rig it as blatantly), some elections are rigged in the most blatant way and even more and in the ideal case there are no more elections (under some stupid pretext they’ve got rid of governor elections and now in some towns and cities mayors are not elected either because that saves money). And referendums there while still theoretically possible can’t be on any question related to government or status of some region or the questions that are decided by government.
So depending on luck in some elections a vote can matter, in other cases it doesn’t matter and in some cases it matters that much that the votes are cast and counted without voter’s participation (some regions constantly report that over 100% of voters were present and there’s a Russian meme 146% that appeared because when they reported result for parliament elections in Rostov region IIRC the percents from different parties added up to that number and there were some other regions with total sum over 100%).
There are many tricks to get desired results—inventing new demands to filter out unwanted candidates (their neighbour Belarus has a joke “In order to be eligible as presidential candidate the person must have at least five years of presidential experience”), the same voters voting again and again (because there’s a special document allowing a voter to vote in other region—and groups of people can have a dozen of such permits per member and thus vote repeatedly in several places), putting a sheaf of “properly” filled ballots into ballot box or simply counting them as you see fit no matter what was the actual vote there.
Similar story with petitions—they are often masked with similar petitions or later an expert group finds that petition to be infeasible or contradicting the law.
FFmpeg
In the old days voting was usually called mostly on naming issues and it worked. But then disagreement with the practices of the FFmpeg leader (like committing code without any review and despite objections) escalated to the point of The Split but before that there were ugly votings that included old MPlayer members that nobody cared about in FFmpeg (because the leader said everybody with commit rights on svn.mplayerhq.hu should have a vote). So after The Split and another ugly voting there were two projects. I don’t remember any voting in Libav but in FFmpeg this tradition still holds. Like recently there was a voting committee formed and there were at least two serious votes (not just a new season logo in trac)—for code of conduct (because every project should have one but not necessarily follow it) and for banning Carl Eugen Hoyos for some time. The first one obviously passed, the second one rather expectedly failed. But then A Person Known For Resigning As Leader took an action that should be allowed only to leaders and banned some people for 24 hours from the mailing list.
Well, I think it’s clear now that FFmpeg voting is not on North Korea level because there’s animosity there that can be expected only from current MPlayer team but not FFmpeg. But is FFmpeg on par with Russia? Maybe not yet but it tries hard IMO.