On Wed, 26 Sep 2007, Doug Orleans wrote:
I'm also a little worried about problems that could result from allowing incomplete ballots. For example, suppose Trip Away had only appeared on one ballot (because, say, no one else could figure out how to play from the rules), but it was ranked first on that ballot, above all the other games. It would then win the competition, because its margin over every other game would be 1, and there would be no inconsistencies. In practice, I highly doubt that anything like this would happen.
This is why standard ranked-pairs is to have all unranked candidates lose to any ranked candidates on a ballot; honestly, that's probably how voting aught to be done for this, because counting partial ballots the way we do /does/ break the algorithm, just as you described. Does doing so change the outcome in this case?
-- Dale Sheldon dales@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx