Ah.  You mean if the proposal was deactivated, `old_nodes` would be `[]`?  That would make sense.  I was confused by the first half of the sentence because it was missing the context - so I didn't read the rest carefully.  I think this is much clearer:

    # If the proposal was previously deactivated, old_nodes is [] so
    # we won't have figured out the founder yet.  But we want to
    # keep the original founder if the proposal gets reactivated, so
    # we iterate over the members just in case one of them was
    # previously a founder.