Editor's note: Jimbo Wales's selections for the Arbitration Committee will be published in the December 26th issue.

The December 2006 Arbitration Committee elections concluded this week. 31 candidates ran for one of at least six positions on the Committee. It is anticipated that Jimbo Wales will make his selections for the Committee this week.

At the beginning of the elections, 37 candidates had submitted their names; however, six candidates — crazytales56297, Doc glasgow, freakofnurture, JzG, MONGO, and Voice of All, had withdrawn from the race. Radiant! also resigned, but later re-entered the race.

It is believed that at least six seats will be available in the race, with the resignation of Mindspillage, who was nominated to one of three new seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees (see archived story). The other five seats will come from the five positions in Tranche Gamma, where no sitting arbitrator chose to stand in the elections. These five seats would serve a three-year term ending in December 2009, while the person chosen to replace Mindspillage in Tranche Beta would next stand for election in December 2008.

At the end of the elections, just three candidates held over 90% support: Flcelloguy, Kirill Lokshin, and Paul August. Two other candidates ( UninvitedCompany and Jpgordon) held at least 85% support, and FloNight and Blnguyen ran close behind, with 84%. Can't sleep, clown will eat me received the most support votes (303), but with 100 oppose votes, his 75% support ranked 8th. In all, 17 of the 32 candidates held at least 50% support, making them eligible to be chosen by Jimbo Wales at the close of the elections.

Final election statistics are available at User:Gurch/Reports/ArbComElections and User:Mathbot/ArbCom Election December 2006; the former utilizes the new sortable wikitable syntax, allowing users to sort the results by the number of support and oppose votes, the support-oppose margin, and the support percentage.