Anthony Towns said:
<excellent analysis snipped>
Fundamentally, what it requires is for very few people to express
full preferences. There're only two reasons for this: one is that most
people don't understand the issue, which isn't what happens in Debian;
Or at least if people don't understand the issue, they think they
understand it. ;-) Good, then. :-)
and the other is that they see some benefit in voting against their
true preferences.
And for large X and Y, the above example is very unstable; and I don't
believe it could realistically be used as a strategy.
I agree.
So, in this situation, how would you feel if only Q-1 developers voted
for C, but lots of other people voted C at equal rank to D?
Tough luck. It's not remotely difficult to get Q developers to rank an
option higher than "further discussion".
In that case, I withdraw all objections and proposal changes. As long
as everyone's aware of the issue, if it appears to be an extremely
remote possibility (and you've made a very good case that it is) then no
need to worry about it.
If actual instances happen of an option other than the default become
the winner due to the 'quorum' (where something else would have won
without it), then I'm sure someone will bring this up again, but it does
seem extremely unlikely.
--Nathanael
