What happened to the last vote? I saw some criticism that Ian jumped the gun by calling for votes when he did and putting two issues on at once but haven't read the archive in the meantime.
Pretty unfortunate it took this long. Even as a casual observer it's looked like they'd eventually pick systemd a month ago. Hopefully this vote is the last one.
Steve Langasek objected to the wording of the "tight coupling" and "loose coupling" options, and several others on the committee decided to vote Further Discussion first in response to that. It turns out that Steve (upstart maintainer) and Russ (primary systemd advocate on the committee) both agree fairly closely on that issue, in that the committee really shouldn't be ruling on that question in that way.
It seems like that's the fundamental split between Ian and Everyone Else. Russ, Bdale, Steve, and Colin all want to make sure that people don't start creating unreasonable dependency chains ("I want the functionality provided by logind for my DE, therefore I will require systemd as the init system") when alternatives are available ("I need the functionality provided by logind so I require that and let systemd or the Canonical fork of logind provide it").
Ian is speccing it out so that nothing may ever rely on capabilities provided by a init implementation unless the Debian developers add that functionality to every possible init system in the archive. That is a very odd position, to put it mildly (you couldn't e.g. ship a GUI tool to manage upstart. You'd have to rewrite it to support systemd, as well).
Pretty unfortunate it took this long. Even as a casual observer it's looked like they'd eventually pick systemd a month ago. Hopefully this vote is the last one.