First minus last tie breaker

[Charles Fiterman]

At 06:42 PM 10/30/98 EST, you wrote:
>Mr. Ingles wrote in part in Re: More Standards-
>
>Even if the voters are completely sincere and rational, then to the extent
>that they vote along ideological or partisan lines the "best candidates" will
>be the same as the "worst candidates" when looking at the raw returns.  For
>example, suppose two major factions of equal size vote ABCD and DCBA for
>purely ideological or partisan reasons.  You end up with candidates A and D,
>who are tied for both first and last place. In this case, all this really
>means is that you have redundant information in the last half of the list.
>----
>D- The above suggests yet another head to head tiebreaker if there is/are no
>Condorcet winner(s)--

If we have a tie between ABCD and DCBA it is likely that we have
a small electorate and will get a tie between A and D in the runoff.
The runoff only serves to delay the selection and waste tax money
on running another election.

I prefer the traditional American solution of a single hand of five
card draw poker. More international is to flip a coin.

One of the candidates in the meta election is the requirment of
decisiveness. The election must make the decision in all cases
and not put it off.