Last I checked, the top two leaders on the leaderboard have over 100 elders. One of them has had only 7 island events (thus needing no explaining of their status as a CHEAT!). The other has 189 elders and 130 island events. Even if all of those events were the one that grants an extra elder (not likely), they still would have 9 extra elders remaining unexplained. My diagnosis: CHEAT!

The people who run the forums really should set up the leaderboards so they can montior them and remove such obvious cheaters from the rankings.