<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On 15.11.2011, at 17.39, Scott Ritchie wrote:</div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div>somewhat recently we had an election where there was a tie<br>between the 2nd and 3rd place candidates for an election where the top<br>two won.</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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).</div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div>2) Create a formal tie-breaking rule. My intuition says that we can<br>give Mark Shuttleworth (who already has special privileges) a second<br>vote that he only uses in the case of a tie, add that vote to the box,<br>and then rerun the election.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.<br><br></div><div>Juho</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><div style="text-indent: 0px;margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 63px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Helvetica; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><div><br></div></font></div></body></html>