Actually, the voter may not have been larger and could even have been smaller. It is true that Gleff got a well-deserved vote of confidence, but if you look at next numbers on the list, you will see that they did not come from additional voters but rather from additional votes per voter.

Gleff received 1223 votes but the top five candidates (including Gleff) received an average of 904 votes.

In last year's election, the top five candidates all received votes of around 850 (I don't have the actual figures as they no longer appear in F/T records). Suffice it to say that no candidate last year reached 900 and none of the top five was below 800.

So for the top five candidates, there was a total increase of about 250 votes. Yet each person was allowed this year to cast five ballots instead of the four he cast the previous year.

Okay, we know that at a minimum 1223 different people voted this year (because that is the total that Gleff received). Guess what? Even if that did not represent a single extra voter over the previous year, it still supplies 1223 more votes -- five times more than is needed to get the 250 additional votes received by the five top candidates.

It would be interesting to learn just how many people voted this year compared to last year.