Carter was up against Sruthi Chandran, who was bidding to become the first female leader of the project, and Brian Gupta, a member of the project for the last seven years.

Carter had cited the need for better publicity, getting more feedback to ease up issues that contributors faced and better visibility and transparency about funds received and how they were spent in his election platform.

The 2019 winner, Sam Hartman, did not run, saying he did not think it was a good idea to do so right now, but not ruling out the possibility of running for the post in the future.

As the project says, "Consider all possible two-way races between candidates. The Condorcet winner, if there is one, is the one candidate who can beat each other candidate in a two-way race with that candidate."

Debian is one of the few free software projects that holds elections. It has done so since it was set up in 1993 by the late Ian Murdock.

The community Linux distribution caters to the largest number of architectures among the 300-odd distros, and has served as the foundation for many other distributions, including Ubuntu, the most popular and most widely used distro.