On 2023-07-07 22:11, Greg Stein wrote:
On Fri, Jul 7, 2023 at 1:53 PM Craig Russell <apache....@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
I'm serving on the Santa Clara County Citizens' Commission on Elections
and we're working to recommend settings for machines tabulating ranked
choice voting.
One of the settings deals with what to do when there is a tie for last
place during a round. The settings allow looking at the vote totals in
previous rounds. The following options are available:
• None: ties are broken manually.
• Backwards: the system attempts to break ties using vote totals in
previous rounds going backwards from the round preceding the current round
to the first round.
• Forwards: the system will attempt to break ties using vote totals in
previous rounds going forward from first round to the round preceding the
current round.
Is there anything in Steve that allows tie breaking?
Hey Craig!
Very interesting question. STeVe does not have a configuration switch for
when that happens. When it finds a tie, and needs to exclude "the lowest",
it simply flips a coin. It will note that in the output, so I guess
somebody could see the situation and handle it differently.
So to your original concern, for SCCCCoE, we (the Apache STeVe community)
don't have any deep thoughts to provide on options or recommendations. The
codebase just throws random numbers at the issue. That has never really sat
well with me, but it has never been a problem in Apache elections and
"needed solving". It could be interesting to add the backwards/forwards
options for use in the future.
Minor note that is perhaps worth...noting; STeVe does not throw truly
random numbers at it. The random number is determined in advance based
on the candidate list, such that, whenever a choice has to be made, it
will make the same choice every time you run the same STV election
through it.
Cheers,
-g
