Important edit: As
novalis pointed out in comments, the documentation of the voting protocol is unclear, and I interpreted some of it a bit differently than what the actual LJ source code implements. This revises my analysis considerably! What follows is the revised analysis.Note that this is somewhat of an interesting election. Nominally, it's one of the "instant runoff" votes where voters rank the candidates, and the candidates who have fewest first-rank votes are eliminated and "their" voters have their second-rank votes taken as first-rank votes. If a voter has all three of their candidates eliminated, their ballot is discarded; when a candidate ends up with more than 50% of the top-rank votes on remaining ballots, they're declared the winner.
What's interesting is that it's not a closed-tally election. Anyone who has voted can (a) immediately see the current totals, and (b) change their vote. It's not currently possible to see exactly what will happen in the runoffs, but we can make some reasonable guesses on the bounds.
Meanwhile, regardless of how the runoff goes, it's currently a three-way race between
legomymalfoy, 
jameth, and rm, in that order. Unless things swing dramatically, votes for anyone else are likely to only serve as endorsements of their position statements, which isn't likely to mean much.Thus, unless things change notably, the only votes that are likely to matter are votes for
legomymalfoy, rm, or jameth.Personally, from a quick look through the position statements, I suspect that I would prefer
rm to legomymalfoy (and I have seen several strong endorsements agreeing with that position), but I'm pretty sure either would do well, while it's clear that jameth would not be an effective user representative, to say the least. Given the current totals, it seems pretty clear that rm won't catch legomymalfoy in the first-rank votes; their votes are running about 2.5:1 between them. There is some danger that jameth will catch up, though; that ratio is about 1.5:1.However,
rm may not be that far behind legomymalfoy in the runoff, since she's got quite a lot of second-rank votes; there's a reasonable chance she could catch legomymalfoy once those are counted. (Of course, if a lot of those are from the people who have legomymalfoy as their first choice, then they'll never count.)Old, erroneous analysis:
What's interesting is that it's not a closed-tally election. Anyone who has voted can (a) immediately see the current totals, and (b) change their vote. It's not currently possible to see exactly what will happen in the runoffs, but we can tell that it doesn't matter; there's nobody who is currently on the ballots of 50% of the voters (the leader's a bit over 40%), so the instant runoff can't pick a winner.
Thus, unless things change notably, the only vote that is likely to matter is your first-rank vote.
Meanwhile, looking at the first-rank votes, it's currently a three-way race between
Thus, unless things change notably, the only vote that is likely to matter is a vote for
Personally, from a quick look through the position statements, I suspect that I would prefer
Also, I'll note that
Therefore, my practical endorsement is this: Vote
Therefore, my practical endorsement is this: Vote
rm at first-rank, legomymalfoy at second-rank, and put your third-rank vote on someone you like. If you've already voted, go here to change your vote.(See, this is much easier than trying to pick among the at-least-a-half-dozen really good candidates who are running!)
