Care to elaborate (on both, i.e., what's the upstart issue and how a Debian vote relates to it)? It seems I missed all of that, but would be grateful to learn more.
Upstart predates systemd by over four years. I just checked the initial release dates on Wikipedia to confirm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart [August 24, 2006]
vs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd [30 March 2010]