Most positions are closed or appointed. Moderation Councillor is voted upon by the current moderators. Balance Councillor is voted upon by the current balance team. Game Councillor is effectively appointed because like 2 dudes even touch the lua repo. DevOps precedent has basically been appointment but that's because there hasn't been a situation of multiple qualified candidates wanting to have the position. And so on and so forth.
For Player Councillor to operate in a similar fashion you'd need it to basically be like the trainers, TDs, and matchmaker team vote for their manager but the whole issue here is that these teams are quite fluid and low in barrier to entry. If I had a closed election like this, I'd have 4 dozen complaints about rigging the vote because I didn't let some dude that hadn't logged onto FAF for 3 years that had a trainer avatar in 2017 for a few months participate etc. Same thing with TDs. I already dealt with a ton of moaning because I would remove people as TDs if they failed to host a tournament within the last year, imagine that also carried the loss of some voter privilege.