election_title: "Crowded field, rung 7 — 7 candidates, 65 voters, counted by STAR"

scenario_description: |-
  RUNG 3 — seven candidates, and the score ballot runs out of room.

  Clara (9) and Felix (16) join, one on each side again, both closer in than the last
  pair. Diego STILL beats every one of the other six head-to-head — six wins out of six,
  the Condorcet winner for the third rung running, and Ranked Robin returns him
  (crowded_field_c7_ranked_robin.yaml).

  STAR does not. Clara, standing two steps from Diego, edges him in the scoring round
  225 to 219. Both reach the runoff — so this is NOT the top-two rule discarding anyone,
  the mechanism people usually reach for — and Clara wins it 23–17, with **25 of the 65
  voters expressing no preference at all** between the two. That is the lesson in one
  line: seven candidates on a six-rung ballot (0–5) leaves little room to separate two
  candidates standing near each other, so a preference that is perfectly real on the
  spectrum is not on the paper.

  Read the pairwise matrix against the score totals. Diego wins every column and loses
  the election. On the ranked ballots of the same voters he beats Clara 36–29
  (crowded_field_c7_ranked_robin.yaml); on this 0–5 ballot that margin has been rounded
  away.

  One warning about this file's [Divergence from STAR] block: it converts scores to ranks
  to guess at RCV-IRV and Choose-One, and the engine's own note says how many ballots
  carry tied scores. Take those two results from crowded_field_c7_irv.yaml instead, where
  the ballots are real rankings.

  Construction: build_ladder.py in this folder. 65 voters in seven blocs at 0, 4, 8, 12,
  16, 20, 24 (sizes 6, 10, 13, 9, 12, 8, 7); candidates fixed at Ana 1 · Bruno 6 ·
  Clara 9 · Diego 11 · Elsa 14 · Felix 16 · Greta 22; utility = minus distance; scores =
  each bloc's own min-max scaling onto 0–5. Nothing is tuned, and no count at any rung is
  settled by a tie-break.

voting_method: STAR
num_winners: 1

lot_numbers: [Ana, Bruno, Clara, Diego, Elsa, Felix, Greta]

ballots: |-
  Count:Ana,Bruno,Clara,Diego,Elsa,Felix,Greta
  6:5,4,3,3,2,1,0    # bloc at 0
  10:5,5,4,3,2,2,0    # bloc at 4
  13:3,5,5,4,3,2,0    # bloc at 8
  9:0,2,4,5,4,4,0    # bloc at 12
  12:0,2,3,3,4,5,3    # bloc at 16
  8:0,1,2,3,4,4,5    # bloc at 20
  7:0,1,2,2,3,4,5    # bloc at 24

expected_winners:
  - Clara

# file: crowded_field_c7_star.yaml