[EM] Could a single specially-crafted new vote resolve all ties in a Shulze election?

[Juho Laatu]

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




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20111115/4854d26b/attachment-0004.htm>