This development had to be expected, although it is unfortunate for Debian, which is a diversive group of people with various interests and personalities.
The reason it is not unexpected becomes apparent if you look at the history of this vote. With Debian's constitution, the formal process of General Resolutions (GRs) was introduced, which is a way to make group decisions by the support of a majority.
The GRs are rarely used, which shows how democratic Debian actually is (not really much at all). The only "interesting" GR that was ever introduced by the Debian members was this non-free proposal. Of course, as it was a proposal that could really have changed something (rather than just being a meaningless formality to legitimize an existing institution), it had to be prevented.
The way this was done is to attack the legitimacy of the issue. It was suggested that it should not be possible to change the Debian social contract with a GR, despite the fact that the constitution had been accepted by a huge majority of the Debian members long before. It was suggested that it was an omission that the Debian constitution did not exempt the Debian social contract from modifications by a simple majority.
So, the constitution had to be "fixed", which means, it had to be ensured that meaningful changes are not possible, by raising the barrier to a 3:1 majority, putting the social contract at the same level as the constitution itself.
This issue was proposed in a GR and voted upon long after the non-free GR was introduced. The non-free GR was simply stalled. In fact, this was not enough: The non-free GR could still have passed. So it was stalled another few years.
I have then at some point stopped following this issue. Now, after four years after having been introduced, and after changing the constitution to raise the barrier, this issue was voted upon.
In fact, given the non-democratic nature of Debian, and the highly authoritative and repressive long term Debian maintainers who sit on delegate positions, it is surprising that this issue was vote upon at all. One could call that a success, by all means. So far, and despite the difficulties, it has been one of the few exceptional democratic moments of Debian.
Is it surprising then that the suggestion to remove non-free from Debian didn't even get a simple majority? Maybe. We don't know why that is the case. However, it means that beside Debian there is still some room for a GNU distribution that breathes the free software spirit and embodies it without compromise.
Number of packages in Debian non-free: 276.
Number of packages in Debian contrib: 332 (contrib requires non-free to compile or run)
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