election_title: "Street trees — five rounds, and the bar keeps dropping"

scenario_description: |-
  A town picks ONE species for its main street. Six on the ballot, 100 voters,
  and most people rank only the one or two they actually care about — which is
  what real voters do in a crowded field, and is the whole reason this count
  gets hard to follow.

  Built to demonstrate three things the small teaching examples cannot, because
  a three-candidate election finishes in one elimination:

  1. FIVE ROUNDS. Fir, then Dogwood, then Elm, then Cedar are eliminated before
     anyone clears the bar.
  2. THE LEAD CHANGES HANDS. Ash leads rounds 1 and 2 on 30 first choices.
     Birch passes Ash in round 3 (32 to 30) and is never headed again. Reporting
     this election from its first-choice totals would have named the loser.
  3. THE MAJORITY BAR MOVES. Every ballot whose ranked species are all out stops
     counting (the report calls these "Blank Votes"), so the pile of active
     ballots shrinks 100 -> 97 -> 93 -> 85 -> 77 and the majority needed falls
     51 -> 49 -> 47 -> 43 -> 39. Birch wins on 47 — SIX FEWER than the 51 the
     election opened needing. It is a majority of the ballots still active
     (47 of 77 = 61%), not of the people who voted (47%).

  Deliberately NOT a pathology case. Birch is the Condorcet winner, beating
  every rival head-to-head, so RCV-IRV lands on the same species STAR or Ranked
  Robin would. The lesson is the COST OF FOLLOWING THE COUNT, not a wrong
  winner — which is why it is safe to hand to someone who likes RCV.

  Companion to RCV_IRV_is_simple.md, which argues that the ballot is the simple
  half and the count is not. This file is that argument's evidence.
voting_method: RCV_IRV
num_winners: 1

# 100 voters, six species. Ash and Birch are never eliminated, so their blocs
# never transfer — the rankings after their first choice are there for the
# pairwise/Condorcet picture only, and changing them does not move a single
# round. Every transfer and every exhausted ballot comes from the four smaller
# blocs below them, where the truncation lives.
ballots: |-
  20:Ash>Birch>Cedar
  10:Ash
  24:Birch>Dogwood
  10:Cedar>Birch
  8:Cedar
  8:Dogwood>Birch
  4:Dogwood
  5:Elm>Birch
  4:Elm
  4:Fir>Elm
  3:Fir

expected_winners:
  - Birch

# file: street_trees_five_rounds_c6_b100.yaml