We recently began the sixth moderator election on Stack Overflow. There is a huge number of highly qualified candidates, and there are 23 overall at the time of this writing.

That's great, but there's this to consider:

After 7 days, the top 30 nominees, ordered by reputation, advance to the primary phase. However, if there are 10 candidates or less [sic], we skip directly to the election phase. _Source

Considering the fact that it has been less than nine hours and there's still a week to go, it is almost certain that we will hit that 30 candidate threshold by the time nominations close.

Since we mostly agree that reputation isn't a very good indicator of moderation ability, I really don't think that it's a good idea to use that as the bottleneck for primaries. This is really only a problem on large sites like Stack Overflow, but it is a problem nonetheless.

The major issue here is the fact that there are a lot of high rep users who will come seemingly out of nowhere for the moderator election and disappear again afterward. A lot of these users, despite often having high (>= 20k on Stack Overflow) reputation, have very low Meta participation and very little moderation experience.

Because of this, they'll be pushing out users who may be more qualified in terms of moderation experience simply because they have more reputation, which many herald as a sign of site participation, but which can also be the result of many other factors.

For that reason, I don't think it's a good idea to use reputation as the deciding factor here. This is a time-sensitive issue, as the primaries start in a week. It appears that this will be the first election since, well, the first election that the bottleneck will be invoked, and I think we can all agree that a lot has changed since then.