burial — the worked burial pair¶

Burial is to Condorcet methods what center squeeze is to IRV: the signature strategic wart. Rank the frontrunner last — below candidates you honestly like less — manufacture a cycle, and win on the record. (Signature, not exclusive: burial works on Borda and STAR too, and only IRV largely escapes it. All four, side by side → the Burial topic hub.) This repo shows IRV's wart loudly and often, so it shows Ranked Robin's the same way: a sincere election a compromise wins cleanly, and the coordinated lie that takes it from her. Live, triple-checked, deterministic on every engine.

▶ Live on BetterVoting: - Part 1, sincere: vote · results ↗ (election 7q6by8, Test ID BV2208) - Part 2, buried: vote · results ↗ (election fxhw6g, Test ID BV2209)

The electorate¶

A design club of 42 ranks four gemstones: Amber, Beryl, Coral, Diamond.

Count	sincere ranking
15	Amber > Beryl > Coral > Diamond — the buriers-to-be; Beryl is their honest second
12	Beryl > Amber > Diamond > Coral
9	Coral > Diamond > Beryl > Amber
6	Diamond > Beryl > Coral > Amber

Part 1 — sincere: Beryl beats everyone¶

Round-Robin — every pair, head-to-head (For – Against):
   Beryl    beats Amber     27 – 15
   Amber    beats Coral     27 – 15
   Amber    beats Diamond   27 – 15
   Beryl    beats Coral     33 –  9
   Beryl    beats Diamond   27 – 15
   Coral    beats Diamond   24 – 18

Win–loss record:
    #  Candidate  W–L–T  Copeland  Margin  Beats
    1  Beryl      3–0–0         3     +48  Amber, Coral, Diamond
    2  Amber      2–1–0         2     +12  Coral, Diamond
    3  Coral      1–2–0         1     -30  Diamond
    4  Diamond    0–3–0         0     -30  —

Winner — Ranked Robin (RCV-RR): Beryl
   beats every opponent head-to-head — the Condorcet winner.

Clean 3–0, no cycle, no tie. But look at who builds Beryl's three wins. Her 33–9 over Coral and her 27–15 over Diamond both contain the 15 Amber-first ballots — support those voters can withdraw. Her 27–15 over Amber contains none of them (they already rank Amber first). That accounting is the whole strategy.

Part 2 — the burial: fifteen voters rank the leader last¶

The 15 Amber-first voters switch to Amber > Coral > Diamond > Beryl — Beryl, their honest second choice, now ranked below two gems they like less. That is burial, and its reach is exactly the buriers' own weight inside the victim's coalitions:

Beryl over Coral, 33–9 → flips to Coral 24–18 (15 of her 33 were the buriers).
Beryl over Diamond, 27–15 → flips to Diamond 30–12 (same reason).
Beryl over Amber, 27–15 → survives untouched (zero burier ballots in it — they can't withdraw support they never gave).

Round-Robin — every pair, head-to-head (For – Against):
   Amber    beats Coral     27 – 15
   Amber    beats Diamond   27 – 15
   Beryl    beats Amber     27 – 15
   Coral    beats Diamond   24 – 18
   Coral    beats Beryl     24 – 18
   Diamond  beats Beryl     30 – 12

Win–loss record:
    #  Candidate  W–L–T  Copeland  Margin  Beats
    1  Amber      2–1–0         2     +12  Coral, Diamond
    2  Coral      2–1–0         2      +0  Diamond, Beryl
    3  Diamond    1–2–0         1      +0  Beryl
    4  Beryl      1–2–0         1     -12  Amber

Winner — Ranked Robin (RCV-RR): Amber
   *** 2 candidates tie for the most wins (Amber, Coral) — a Condorcet cycle
   (no candidate beats all others). Resolved by total margin, then lot order.

Beryl falls from 3–0 to 1–2. Amber and Coral tie on top at 2–1 — and Amber takes the tie on every metric: total pairwise margin +12 vs 0 (the LH engine's rung), the direct head-to-head 27–15 (BetterVoting's rung), first choices 15 vs 9. Note the fine print of the mechanics: Amber never beats Beryl directly — the buriers can demolish Beryl's record but cannot flip her win over their own candidate. Burial wins through the standings, not the matchup.

The buriers turned Beryl's win into Amber's win. Their honest second choice lost to their first — mission accomplished, criterion violated (Ranked Robin, like every Condorcet method, fails strategic-nomination-adjacent honesty here; sincere ranking was not their best ballot).

The triple-check¶

Per this repo's cross-checking habit, both halves ran through three independent tabulators:

Half	LH native	pref_voting Copeland	BetterVoting live
sincere	Beryl (3–0)	Beryl (unique leader)	Beryl, `tieBreakType: none`
buried	Amber (margin rung)	leader set	Amber, `tieBreakType: none`

The buried half stays freezable despite the known LH/BV tiebreak divergence (rr_tiebreak_lh_vs_bv.md) because a 2-way record tie resolves deterministically on both ladders — LH by total margin (+12 vs 0), BV by the direct head-to-head (27–15) — and both point at Amber. Contrast BV2142, where a 3-way tie sent BetterVoting to a random draw. (One erratum for the record: the live BV descriptions of this pair carry a slim-vs-blowout aside that mislabels which wins flip; BV descriptions are permanent, so this page and the yamls are the corrected analysis.)

Reading this fairly¶

Burial leaves fingerprints. Sincere ballots showed no cycle; the buried ballots show one. A cycle appearing in a race whose polling showed a clear Condorcet winner is the anomaly — the printed round-robin table is where you'd catch it.
It needs a lot to go right: a large bloc (here 15 of 42 — over a third of the electorate) sitting inside the leader's own majorities, coordination, decent polling, and a willingness to rank a liked candidate last. Fail any of those and the burial fizzles or backfires (bury into the wrong cycle and you elect Coral, the buriers' third choice — one mis-aim away).
Every method has its wart. IRV: center squeeze. STAR: the runoff-born favorite-betrayal sliver. Approval: the threshold dilemma. Ranked Robin and all Condorcet methods: burial. The honest comparison is which warts are systematic and which need a heist — this one is a heist, but a real one.

Run it yourself¶

python STARVote_LH_tabulation_engine/starvote_larry_hastings.py 05_Ranked_Robin/03_Criteria/burial/cases/bv2208_7q6by8_burial_sincere.yaml
python STARVote_LH_tabulation_engine/starvote_larry_hastings.py 05_Ranked_Robin/03_Criteria/burial/cases/bv2209_fxhw6g_burial_pays.yaml

Sources: bv2208_7q6by8_burial_sincere.yaml · bv2209_fxhw6g_burial_pays.yaml. Full mirrors: sincere ballots · burial pays.

Where this comes from. Ballots and cast are this repo's own, built so the burial's anatomy is visible in the pairwise table (which wins the buriers sit inside, which they don't). Method home: Ranked Robin · cycle handling: cycle_resolution.md · the LH-vs-BV tiebreak caveat: rr_tiebreak_lh_vs_bv.md.