You are allowed to reorder the choices on your ballot paper, and this is effective. That is, you can take the ballot paper in the CFV and edit the lines in it into your preferred order with cut and paste. You can look at the letters, or the Secretary's summary lines, when you do that. It's important to use a proper text editor and not linewrap things while you do this. After, that you can simply write numbers 1 to 8 into the boxes down the left hand side. Rank all the options. That way when you get your vote ack back, any parse failure will show up as a blank space in the ack.

If you don't know what's going on, you may wish to read my summary and briefing blog post from a few weeks ago. There are 7 options on the ballot, plus Further Discussion (FD). With this posting I'm trying to help voting Debian Members (Debian Developers) cast their votes. I am going to be neutral about the technical merits of systemd. My advice does not depend on your opinion about that. So my advice here is addressed to people who like systemd and want to keep running it, and developing with it, as well as, of course, people who prefer not to use systemd. I'm even addressing readers who think systemd has useful features which they would like Debian packages to be able to use. However, I am going to be opinionated about one key question: My baseline is that Debian must welcome code contributions to support running without systemd, just as it welcomes code contributions for other non-default setups. If you agree with that principle, then this posting is for you. Unfortunately this principle is controversial. Several of the options on the current GR mean rejecting contributions of non-systemd support. So in that sense I am not neutral.