There were no "dirty tricks". The C++ standards committee works by a vaguely defined "consensus", which requires more than "the majority rules". Contracts got added to the C++26 draft. Then there was consensus that Contracts needed to be fixed, but they could never get consensus on any particular fix. So they cruised along relatively unchanged.
In the end, the only way to NOT accept a marginal Contracts feature was to vote down the full language spec. Now they'll regroup and decide how to proceed.
Stroustrup is 75 years old. This is not only hard to believe because of his age, but also because it requires that people who oppose his views somehow have distinct sleeping patterns from ones who agree with his views. Weird, man.
Not weird if they're mostly from different continents.
When I saw him a year or so ago he said he wasn't happy with how things were going, but never alluded to a coup. But it's his language, so good for him.
It most definitely is not and hasn't been in decades.
A major problem is that some people still put his views on a pedestal, acting like he has a clean track record with his ideas, which he definitely has not - no language designer has ...
...He has the power to do this? And for which elections, exactly? The main go/no-go votes are the ones at the big meetings and I'd imagine there's not a lot of room for scheduling shenanigans there.