Tie-Breaking in STAR

How STAR resolves exact ties — the official tiebreaker ladder ("rungs"), what each rung compares, and how ties are recorded and reproduced in this library's YAML cases and in BetterVoting exports.

Start here → STAR Tie-Breaking — The Full Chain

The pages

• STAR Tie-Breaking — The Full Chain — the complete ladder, rung by rung, with worked examples for ties in the scoring round and the runoff.
• The "dead rung" in STAR's official tiebreaker ladder — a rung that can never decide anything, documented for Equal Vote.
• Tie-Breaking in BetterVoting JSON — Format & Mapping to YAML — where BV exports record tie information and how it maps onto this library's lot_numbers.
• Equal Vote's optional Condorcet Tiebreaker — the third protocol (matches-won → total preference votes → win margin → random), an alternative to the 5-Star Tiebreaker for hand counts, worked on two examples; and why a Condorcet tiebreaker is not Condorcet compliance.

External reference

• BetterVoting's official tie-breaking protocol — BetterVoting's own ladder, and the source of the random "lot" order our BV-backed cases carry. It's close but not identical to the LH ladder above (they part only on a genuinely tied race, and only at two rungs); The Full Chain pins down exactly where. (BetterVoting is advocacy-adjacent, but this is its own factual protocol doc.)