A place to explain your preferences, discuss them, and maybe change your mind.
Some comments on this thread are cross-posted from a text box which appears when you reach the end of the voting process, but everyone is welcome to post here whenever.
You can read about all the candidates here.
I'm not sure if this addresses your concern, but just want to clarify that accounts can only vote if they were created before Oct 22, 2024. I think that having to have created an account prior to the announcement of the donation election is a medium bar (at least I think it's higher than Manifund's event was) — it's quite easy to use the Forum without creating an account, so people who create an account tend not to be casual readers.
I do think it would be interesting to compare the overall results with those of the subset of users who have earned at least some karma.