Sure, if an element of a cycle must be picked then our voting system does have a way of picking one, unless there's a perfect tie. (And the details are really interesting if, like me, you're into that sort of thing.)
But from a Press Release point of view, it would be pretty darn awkward to say "The Debian Project has voted and chosen OPTION ALPHA. It is true that a majority of the voters actually preferred OPTION BETA to OPTION ALPHA. But don't worry about that, because <complicated technical stuff involving graph theory and seemingly-irrelevant options gamma and delta>." That kind of thing is fine for electing a DPL, when presumably candidates ALPHA and BETA and GAMMA are all reasonable choices, given that they're in a winning cycle. Plus we don't really need to justify that decision externally. But for other decisions---and the RMS GR is a poster boy for this---that logic really doesn't fly, and such a situation would be quite problematic. I'm suggesting that, since we came within a razor (just ONE BALLOT, as Adrian Bunk pointed out) of that situation actually occurring, we get in front of things, think about it, and figure out something proactive to prevent it from ever actually happening: to prevent us from ever having to make such an embarrassing press release. --Barak A. Pearlmutter
