[VOTE] Changing PEP 13 to clarify tiebreaking for SC elections

Committers
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The text about tiebreaking, in SC elections, was created when Block Approval was in use. When we voted to adopt Bloc STAR instead, Guido left that text alone, thinking it was “clear enough” as is. But people have disputed what it means, and explicit is better than implicit.

So @zware opened a pull request to clarify the text:

 * Phase 2: Each core team member can assign zero to five stars to each
   candidate. Voting is performed anonymously. The outcome of the vote
   is determined using the `STAR voting system ...
-  modified to use the `Multi-winner Bloc STAR ...
-  approach. If a tie occurs, it may
+  modified to use the `Multi-winner Bloc STAR ... approach. If a tie that is not
+ automatically resolved by the election software occurs, it may
   be resolved by mutual agreement among the candidates, or else the
   winner will be chosen at random.

The thrust is that a voting service may fully automate tiebreaking, and allow no possibility for candidates to negotiate among themselves. This wasn’t a problem under Block Approval, because it only had one step. But under Bloc STAR, a K-winner election may tie internally as often as 2*K times, and voting services generally don’t allow for pausing the scoring process waiting for manual instructions on how each tie is to be resolved.

Time to put it to a vote:

From PEP 13:

Changes to this document require at least a two-thirds majority of votes cast in a core team vote which should be open for two weeks.

Since the next SC election is coming up ooon, time is of the essence. Here’s the poll:

Adopt or not?
  • Adopt the proposed changes to PEP 13
  • Do not adopt
0 voters

@gpshead, could you please work your bcc email magic to alert voters about this poll?

EDIT: the poll is configured to close at 2025-11-12T06:00:00.000Z. Why? “About two weeks” from its posting date. If people want to dispute that, please supply the precise string you’d like to see instead. Note that results won’t be visible (not even to me) until the poll closes.

EDIT: this is an anonymous poll, although voting is restricted to committers. Nobody will see how you voted, or even that you voted. Although my understanding is that Discourse admins (not “just” moderators) can access that data, if they want to.

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For those who haven’t been following along closely, related discussion can be found in the Finding a Bloc STAR provider thread around and beyond message #87, which includes some links to other relevant messages on the PR that created PEP-8107 for this years SC election.

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