I wasn't going to comment after I noticed that y'all aren't looking for advice for failed elections (we're already having that conversation on the per-site metas anyway, so I would just be repeating myself). But then I noticed this:
We have done some cursory research on how other platforms handle their moderation elections and found some appealing practices on Wikipedia.
Please, for the love of [deity], do not copy Wikipedia's Requests for Adminship model without a large amount of care and consideration. This is a matter of significant controversy on-wiki, but suffice it to say that (nearly) everybody agrees that RfA is broken, nobody agrees what is wrong with it, the discussion has been going around in circles for years, and meanwhile they are confirming fewer and fewer admins every year* and their attrition numbers are getting a bit scary. This is, to my mind, the epitome of a failed system, and I think it would be much better to try to learn from its failure rather than try to imitate it.
* Hyperbole. It's not literally decreasing every year, since there are minor ups and downs, but the long-term trend is downwards. The numbers have gotten so small that minor absolute differences are enough to swing whether it goes up or down in a given year.