Imho the contest must not be canceled entirely. Too much work and energy has been spent by too many talented designers. The final choice won´t necessarily change the design used by the foundation but still it is an important competition for the community.

I understand the reservations towards a reboot of the votation given the fact that people were waiting for this vote for a long time, but this cannot be the decisive argument if the vote turns out to be unfair or a mere question of mobilization. To reconsider the proceeding is not, like some seem to argue, a contradiction and betrayal of the participants and the community or an attempt to impose own interests, it is rather the attempt to save the result from being worthless in the long run. This poll may close as it is - but what will the result be worth if people have constant arguments about whether or not the other cheated?

To prevent arguments and to raise the acceptance of the competition it is crucial to have a robust set of rules that is most likely to prevent misconduct - currently I don´t see that. The organizer splitted the vote into a public vote and a vote of the participants, which makes it less likely to be manipulated. However, as the vote of the participants hasn´t been conducted yet, participants are technically able to vote strategically with the result of the public vote in mind. To me that is inaceptable. The vote needs to be made in advance and it needs to be secret until the public vote ends.

This is only one flaw of the current proceeding. There are others like the fact that contributions aren´t standardized and therefore hard to compare. In some cases people don´t know what they are voting for because there are different logos. In other cases participants only created a logo but no different scenarios of use that are pretty important to decide whether the use makes sense.

On page 6 I suggested a two-step votation and an appropriate presentation of the contributions. In general I don´t think that the organizer should decide but rather - as FlipPro said himself - the participants of the competition in mutual agreement.