Is that not a reasonable sample of the 87 core developers eligible to vote?

https://discuss.python.org/groups/committers

It is a rather poor sample, and a sign that either more people than those 87 should be allowed to vote or there is something wrong with how the vote was conducted.

An explicit "do not care" or "none of the above" option in that poll would have shed more light into this.

If they randomly chose 34 people to poll it would be decent sample. But now it's not a sample at all. The responders are not representative of the non-responders.