I don’t see a more current thread dedicated to PEP 8001, so I’ll post my comment here. @ambv recently urged everyone to read PEP 8001, which is why I’m posting now.
I want to suggest a small suggestion / clarification to the PEP text. My suggested wording change is at the bottom of this post.
At the end of PEP 8001, it says–
The chances of [a voting cycle] occurring when there are 21 or more voters, though, is less than 1.5%. [1]
[1] Voting Cycles
To me, this reads like it’s a statement of actual probability. But when you go to the referenced source, it’s an historical statement about certain past real-world elections: “Less than 1.5% of real elections lead to a chance voting cycle when there are 21 voters or more.” (This latter sentence is actually also a bit misleading because it reads as a statement in the present sentence about all real elections with more than 21 voters. But if you go to its source, it says it’s about ERS elections that were analyzed, “However, there are only 101 voting cycles (1.45 percent) among the 6,794 ERS elections with 21 or more voters.”)
Also, a couple sentences later, it says, “But on a small council with 3 factions, inadvertent ties are more common [than 10%].”
In our case, it seems possible that the chances of a cycle could be much higher than 1.5% (like the small council example referenced above). This is because our election seems unusual in certain ways. I don’t have a good understanding of the factors that increase the likelihood of a cycle, but in our case there are a large number of options, a number of which could have strong or roughly equal support (though I haven’t been following the discussions enough to know). This is different from most elections I’ve seen.
So maybe that sentence should be qualified more. Perhaps–
For one analyzed set of real-world elections with 21 voters or more, a cycle occurred less than 1.5% of the time. [1]
.