Wikipedia:Administrator elections/May 2026

Administrator elections

Current status

• Thank you for participating in the May 2026 administrator elections. The results are now available and certified.

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• Call for candidates (April 29 – May 5)
• Discussion phase (May 8–12)
• Voting phase (May 13–19)
• Results
• Debrief
• RFC workshop
• RFC phase

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← December 2025

May 2026

October 2026 →

The fourth English Wikipedia administrator elections were held in May 2026, with the call for candidates beginning on April 29, 2026. For more general information on administrator elections, visit Wikipedia:Administrator elections.

Schedule

All times are in UTC.

• Election prep: pick election clerk(s), pick scrutineers, run some test elections, copy subpages.

• Call for candidates: Wednesday 00:00, 29 April 2026 – Tuesday 23:59, 05 May 2026
• Housekeeping phase: Wednesday 00:00, 06 May 2026 – Thursday 23:59, 07 May 2026
• Discussion phase: Friday 00:00, 08 May 2026 – Tuesday 23:59, 12 May 2026
• Voting phase: Wednesday 00:00, 13 May 2026 – Tuesday 23:59, 19 May 2026
• Scrutineering: Wednesday 00:00, 20 May 2026 – around Wednesday 23:59, 20 May 2026
• Results
• Debrief phase
• RFC workshop phase if needed.
• RFC phase if needed.

Eligibility

Candidate eligibility

The only formal prerequisite for adminship is having an extended confirmed account on Wikipedia (which typically means 500 edits and 30 days of experience). In practice, standards are much higher - users with less than one year or 5,000 edits generally don't have a realistic chance of succeeding. To learn about community expectations for RfA candidates, please review past successful and unsuccessful RfAs. You may also review past optional RfA candidate polls or initiate one if you are interested.

Voter eligibility

Administrator elections use the RfA suffrage requirements. To vote, an editor must:

• have an extended confirmed account (which typically means 500 edits and 30 days of experience)
• not be sitewide blocked
• not be a bot

These criteria will be programmed into the SecurePoll software and automatically checked. Additionally, scrutineers will manually remove any duplicate votes, sockpuppet votes, and vanished account votes.

Procedure

Administrator elections are held every 5 months. Excluding the pre-election windows for candidate nominations and ballot setup, the process lasts 12 days: a 5-day period for discussion and questions, followed by a 7-day period for a secret ballot vote. Election cycles and the timeframes for each window and period will be advertised in advance, including by watchlist notices.

Call for candidates

Nominations may only be made within the nominations window to be specified for each election. Candidates may either self-nominate or be nominated by other editors with the candidate's consent. Only candidates who accept their nomination will proceed to the next period. Before the discussion period begins, candidates and nominators may adjust their candidate subpage as they see fit. Candidates will be listed in alphabetical order on election pages. For advice to candidates, see Wikipedia:Advice for admin elections candidates.

Discussion phase

During the 5-day discussion period, the community can ask questions, raise issues, and provide constructive feedback. Candidates are encouraged to participate in the discussion period by answering questions.

Participants are discouraged from posting messages of support/opposition that lack points for discussion. This phase is for sharing thoughts on the candidate or any other topic that may relate to the candidate's suitability for adminship – not for indicating personal voting intentions.

Similar to RfA, the discussion phase will have monitors who are administrators who will moderate inappropriate comments/questions, and may refactor and reorganize comments if they get disorganized. Monitors may not nominate candidates, publicly state an opinion about candidates, create a voter guide, or ask official questions on the discussion page. Monitors may vote.

Voting phase

Once the discussion period ends, voting is open for 7 days by secret ballot (SecurePoll). During this period, discussion is closed, and the page will be marked with a template indicating that discussion is closed. Candidates may be asked direct questions on their user talk pages, but they are not expected to watch their discussion page, nor the election page for the full period, to allow them a respite from community vetting.

The ballot may contain multiple candidates; however, this is not a competitive election. Voters are asked to evaluate each candidate individually, and all candidates who meet the pass threshold are selected to become administrators. Thus all, some, or even no candidates may be selected. Candidates will be listed in alphabetical order.

What data does SecurePoll collect?

To prevent sockpuppetry, SecurePoll logs each voter's IP address, user agent, and X-Forwarded-For header. This data is only viewable by this particular election's scrutineers and alternate scrutineers (see next section), who are English Wikipedia CheckUsers. CheckUsers are trusted by the English Wikipedia community to keep editor personal information private, have been vetted by the Arbitration Committee, and have signed a confidentiality agreement that is on file with the Wikimedia Foundation. Voter IP addresses, user agents, and X-Forwarded-For headers are retained until 60 days after the election ends, at which time they are automatically deleted.

The fact that you voted and what date you voted will be displayed publicly. Who you voted for is encrypted and the software keeps it completely confidential, even to election clerks and scrutineers. An anonymized list of votes is available to election clerks and scrutineers after the election ends, via the "dump" feature. This list of votes is in random order and has all identifiable information about the voter and vote stripped out. A total count of all votes is available to election clerks and scrutineers via the "tally" feature. When tallying, the software will temporarily decrypt the votes, add them together, and provide the result. The tally is then formatted by an election clerk and posted on the results page. No one can view the totals while the vote is open, only at the very end once the "tally" button is pressed and decryption occurs.

Scrutineering and tallying

After voting has ended, the election will be scrutinised by three English Wikipedia CheckUsers. Stewards are also allowed to scrutineer, but require special permission from the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, so for this reason and to not impose on their time, English Wikipedia CheckUsers are preferred. Scrutineers will check for any duplicate, ineligible, or sockpuppeteer votes, and strike them as necessary. Once scrutineering is complete, votes are tallied and results are posted by the election clerk, then signed by the scrutineers. After that process is complete, new admins are granted administrative privileges by a bureaucrat. In past elections, scrutineering has taken anywhere from 1 hour 15 minutes to 4 days, but it may take longer. There is no formal deadline.

To be successful, a candidate must receive a minimum support percentage of 70% and a quorum of 20 support votes. Candidates running to reaffirm community support after a recall petition are subject to a lower minimum support percentage of 55%. The support percentage is calculated by Support / (Support + Oppose) for each candidate. Unsuccessful candidates may run in a future administrator election or create an RfA – there are no restrictions on the number of times you can run.

Withdrawing

If a candidate wants to withdraw from the election before the discussion period, they should remove themselves from the candidate list (without adding themselves to the withdrawn list) and nominate their candidate subpage for speedy deletion. They will not be listed as a candidate during the SecurePoll vote.

If a candidate wishes to withdraw during the discussion period or voting period, they should edit the list of candidates to move themselves to the withdrawn section. For transparency, their candidate subpage shall not be deleted, but the transclusion will be removed from the discussion period page. The candidate subpage will be closed using the template {{subst:Rfaf|aelect=yes}}/{{subst:Rfab|aelect=yes}} to stop further discussion. An attempt will be made to remove the candidate from the SecurePoll ballot, but this is not guaranteed. If the candidate ends up on the SecurePoll ballot, whatever result they achieve will be considered invalid, and election organizers will attempt to keep the result unpublished.

Voter guides

A list of unofficial voter guides may be found at Category:Wikipedia administrator elections May 2026 voter guides. Voter guides may be mentioned in passing and directly linked from candidate pages and talk pages. There will be no official voter guide, nor should voter guides be linked from the election's header template.

Election officials and volunteers

The following are volunteer positions involved with administrating the election:

Position	Summary	Tool requirements	Restrictions	Who	Alternates
Election volunteer	Perform the Todo list.	None	None	Anyone	N/A
Election clerks	Perform the Todo list. Administer the SecurePoll software.	Administrator	Election clerks with database access may not know the decryption keys.	Robertsky, Giraffer, Chaotic Enby	CoconutOctopus, Sohom Datta
Scrutineers	Check the votes in SecurePoll for sockpuppets, using CheckUser-like tools.	CheckUser	None	Barkeep49, RoySmith, Risker	Moneytrees
Monitors	Monitor for civility, appropriateness and organization of discussion. Remove inappropriate questions or comments. Refactor/reorganize discussion for readability. Move lengthy discussions to talk.	Administrator	Monitors may not nominate candidates, publicly state an opinion about candidates, create a voter guide, or ask official questions on discussion pages.	CoconutOctopus, QEDK, Sohom Datta

Results

The results of the May 2026 administrator elections are as follows:

Out of all eligible voters, 548 voters have voted.

A total of 592 votes have been cast. Of these, 43 are thrown away because the voter has voted again, and 4 are struck. There was a technical issue with the struck users' votes, identified during the course of the election by the scrutineers. The users involved were all notified by email that they could revote, but only one did so. Developers are working on this technical issue.

Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 01:54, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

Scrutineer signatures

1. LGTM RoySmith (talk) 02:00, 20 May 2026 (UTC)
2. Barkeep49 (talk) 02:05, 20 May 2026 (UTC)
3. Risker (talk) 02:10, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

Newsletter

If you'd like to receive a user talk message when important administrator election events occur, such as when a date is chosen and when the Call for Candidates phase opens, please add yourself to the mailing list.

See also

• Subpages