You're missing the initial Debian vote, which was made in the Technical Committee, and which came down to a tie.
If you want to claim that process was democratic, you have to believe that the members of the committee perfectly represent the opinions of all Debian developers (to say nothing of Debian users), and therefore have to excuse the fact that the vote had to be settled by giving one of those people, Bdale Garbee (HP's CTO of Linux), effectively two votes.
It was only three days after the tech committee's decision that Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu would fall in line by abandoning Upstart[0], and not until many months later that the first General Resolution was put forward to try overturning the committee.[1] Of course by that time everyone was tired of the arguments and it would have soured relations with Canonical to force Ubuntu back away from systemd, so the GR was doomed from the start.
[0] https://www.admin-magazine.com/News/Ubuntu-Abandons-Upstart
[1] https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_003