Historical election records are incomplete

Question

Two users who were candidates in the first moderator election have since left the site and deleted their accounts. This seems to have caused some issues with the page documenting that election:

• The users who no longer are members are completely missing from the page. (This is true for the nomination, primary, and election tabs.) While it says “9 candidates” in a few places, there are only seven people listed. In my opinion, the platforms should be treated like questions and answers; i.e. they should still be shown, although calling the users “userNNNN” instead of their previous user names.
• The ballot file has also changed and no longer mentions the former users. Apparently, their ID has been set to 0 in the individual ballot lines. As far as I understand the syntax, that makes the file invalid; in any case, it is no longer possible to verify the election results from that file.

Answer 1

Deleted candidates is not a scenario well-supported nor one we have any intention of encouraging.

I manually patched up the list of winners, which should be sufficient to indicate what happened. But we will not modify votes or alter any other data connected to the election (that is: We're not going to create fake users with fake votes winning fake positions in an old election to paper over the fact that two of the winners decided to leave; they're gone).