On 15.11.2011, at 17.39, Scott Ritchie wrote:
> somewhat recently we had an election where there was a tie
> between the 2nd and 3rd place candidates for an election where the top
> two won.
I just note that if you use a (non-proportional) single-winner method that
orders the candidates (maybe with ties) in the order of preference, then your
results are not proportional. I.e. if 51% of the voters like A and B, and 49%
like C and D, then you elect A and B. A proportional method would elect one of
{A, B} and one of {C, D}. Maybe that is however what you want (two best
candidates with no proportionality requirements). CIVS seems to support also a
proportional mode (but maybe that is not what you want).
> 2) Create a formal tie-breaking rule. My intuition says that we can
> give Mark Shuttleworth (who already has special privileges) a second
> vote that he only uses in the case of a tie, add that vote to the box,
> and then rerun the election.
Kristofer Munsterhjelm already noted that you could use that one vote (or
multiple votes) directly to determine the preference order. That would be a
good and simple approach.
I also note that if you want all the votes to be secret, you could allow also
Mark Shuttleworth to cast a secret vote. He could give also an additional
separate public vote that would be used to make the decision in case there is a
tie. That vote could be required to rank all the candidates, so there is no
need for further tie breaking. His public vote could just rank the candidates
in a random order if he doesn't want to use his personal preference order. If
he would give a random order, then we would already be quite close to just
using a random order (lottery) to solve ties.
Juho
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