The recent elections on Blender, Network Engineering, Cryptography and Code Review (all betas) went reasonably well. On some of these the number of candidates was barely enough to hold an election, but that might be attributable to a glitch with election notifications, which was since fixed.
So, I support the idea, but suggest the following process:
- Mod election is announced.
- If the election takes place (and not called off for lack of candidates or another reason*), then after it concludes, graduation is announced, and the perks are enabled.
*Some of the elections had double-digit voter turnouts. What if it was a single-digit number?
Tangential: the recently fully-graduated sites (Biology, Chemistry, etc) haven't got a link in the footer, so I'm not sure what chance the partially-graduates sites have for that.