Here's a graphical representation of what Jon and I talked about a few posts back:

Non-mathy-because-it-doesn't-need-to-be:

  Monkey Kafka Cheese Man Result First Round Of Counting (first prefs only) 60 30 10 It's over. Monkey wins by majority

Mathy-because-it-does-need-to-be:

  Monkey Kafka Cheese Man Result First Round Of Counting (first prefs only) 40 35 25 It's not over yet, no clear majority. Second Round Of Counting (sharing out second prefs from last candidate, Cheese Man) +15 from Cheese voters +10 from Cheese voters [out of the running now, carcass torn up and fed to the other two candidates] wait a second, everyone... Total after round two 55 45   Now Monkey has a clear majority and wins.

And, billytea, the bit I didn't understand in your explanation is the thing about finding the most popular two candidates.

I was thinking, as above, of hoping for an outright winner and only doing the math thing if there wasn't one.

I did get it!

trying to stop the vocal minority from railroading people.

How can you be railroaded if you show up and vote no? I'm still confused about that. If one very strange (and nameless) person wants to start a krav maga thread, the only way Ithey win is if no one else votes. And if no one is against a krav thread, why shouldn't there be one.

I don't think it was workign previously

What Kat said. For the majority of the voters, it wasn't working well enough. No matter which M-W definition of majority we have.

I'm surprised, though, that a vote with 49%, 10%, 10%, 10%, 11% doesn't pass muster for option #1 to win.

The problem is what if the reverse happened? Cheese voters switched 20-5 to Kafka. Kafka wins. All the Monkey voters walk around saying "What happened? We WON the first vote didn't we?" And then it goes to the Supreme Court and it all gets ugly from there.

Seriously. Australian ballots take a lot of explaining, both before and after the vote, to people who don't use this style of balloting in daily life. Look at how hard the World SF Convention has to work, every time, to explain its use in site selection.

The more I think of it, the more I say Dictatorship! Dictatorship all the way! As ita goes, so goes my nation.

"carcass" has two lovely esses.

And Betsy, are we only going to use this for matters of no import whatsoever?

That's not been my impression.

These explanations in the thread are choir preaching because we are talking about the people who don't read Bureaucracy. IJS.

Cheese voters switched 20-5 to Kafka.

There's no switching, if by that you mean they saw the result of the first round and then got to vote again.

To speak precisely, if you discard the Cheese votes for Cheese, and it turns out the Cheese voters all preferred Kafka, then the root emotional reaction is "Wait! Monkey was winning, and then Kafka got a majority! How can this be? This isn't what I meant at all!"