election_title: Weak Condorcet loser — STAR elects a candidate who beats nobody
scenario_description: |-
  Five voters, three candidates: Ada, Ben, Cora.

  A CONDORCET LOSER loses every head-to-head. A WEAK Condorcet loser is the
  ties-allowed version: they lose OR TIE every head-to-head — that is, they
  BEAT NOBODY. Every strict Condorcet loser is a weak one; the converse fails,
  and the gap between the two is exactly one pairwise tie.

  Here the pairwise results are:
    Ada beats Ben  3-2      Ada beats Cora 3-2      Ben ties Cora 2-2
  So Ada is the (strict) Condorcet winner, and BOTH Ben and Cora beat nobody —
  they are jointly weak Condorcet losers. Note the non-uniqueness: unlike a
  strict Condorcet loser, a weak one need not be alone.

  Scoring Round: Ben 18, Cora 16, Ada 15. Ada is polarizing — three voters give
  her a 5 and two give her a 0 — so the broadly-acceptable pair advances and the
  Condorcet winner is eliminated before the runoff.

  Automatic Runoff: Ben vs Cora is the 2-2 pairwise TIE (one voter scored both
  4, so they are Equal Support). STAR's first tiebreaker is the higher score,
  and Ben wins it.

  The result: STAR elects Ben, a weak Condorcet loser. And it had no choice —
  BOTH finalists beat nobody, so whichever won the tiebreak was going to be one.

  Why this cannot happen with a STRICT Condorcet loser: a strict loser loses the
  runoff to the other finalist by definition, so STAR can never elect one. The
  weak version slips through precisely because a TIE is not a loss, and a tie
  hands the decision to the tiebreaker instead. That single word — "or ties" —
  is the whole difference between a criterion STAR passes and one it fails.

  Honest framing: this is a knife-edge construction. It needs an exact pairwise
  tie between the two finalists, which is vanishingly rare in any electorate
  large enough to matter. Read it as "the criterion is failed" (a possibility
  result), not as "this happens in practice."

bv_test_id: BV2249
bv_election_id: c73pfw
bv_results_url: https://bettervoting.com/c73pfw/results
# Live on BetterVoting as BV2249 (election c73pfw) — the STAR race of a three-race
# election (STAR / Approval / Ranked Robin) on these same five voters.
# Frozen export: wcl_c3_b5_star_bv_export.json (one export covers all three races).

voting_method: STAR
num_winners: 1

ballots: |-
  Ada,Ben,Cora
  5,4,4   # loves Ada; Ben and Cora equally acceptable -> Equal Support in the runoff
  5,4,1   # loves Ada, tolerates Ben, dislikes Cora
  5,4,3   # loves Ada, tolerates Ben and Cora
  0,3,4   # rejects Ada, prefers Cora over Ben
  0,3,4   # rejects Ada, prefers Cora over Ben

expected_winners:
  - Ben

# file: wcl_c3_b5_star.yaml