So this was seemingly part of the big upgrade this week - and I hadn't seen any discussion about it anywhere, so wanted to draw some attention to it.
The collective module (so, this effects council and the tech. committee) now has a privileged member, known as the "prime" who can determine what the default vote for any abstaining voters is at the end of a given voting period the Prime is currently selected as the "most popular" member (based on phragmén vote, not popular vote!) in council.
I guess this is one solution to the problem of absentee council members (more discussion on the topic here) - if you do not vote, you are giving your decision to the most popular councilor.