Tied at the top: Difference between revisions

One possible issue with the tied at the top rule in its formulation mentioned above is that it forces voters who don't want to create pairwise ties between the candidates they equally rank 1st to do so. For example, a Democrat voter wishing to indicate no preference between two Democrat candidates while helping both of them [[pairwise beat]] a Republican candidate may simply wish to allow other voters to choose which of the Democrats should win, rather than preventing one from pairwise beating the other.. Thus, one possible improvement to the rule is to allow voters to explicitly indicate whether or not they want the candidates they rank 1st to be in a pairwise tie or not. One way to do this is to, in addition to allowing voters to rank candidates 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc, allow voters to indicate an "above-1st"/"0th" rank which is counted as superior to all ranks, including the 1st rank. Another way would be to allow voters to check a box indicating they want all top-ranked candidates to pairwise tie if possible.