Tie Breakers

The most important thing for a Tie Breaker to do is it should use some reproducable difference in the Ballots to pick a winner from a Tie. The next thing it should do is make sense. Finally, the ideal Tie Breaker will resolve when there is any difference to be found. Arguably the best use of Borda Count is as a Tie Breaker, First Choice votes and Approval are also other great choices.

Grand Junction

The Grand Junction (also known as Bucklin) method is one of the simplest and easiest to Hand Count RCV resolution methods. Other than that it is generally not considered a good method.

Because it is simple, and always resolves, except when ballots are perfectly matched up, it is a really

The (Standard) Grand Junction Method

  1. Count the Ballots to determine the quota for a majority.

  2. Count the first choices and elect a choice which has a majority.

  3. If there is no winner add the second choices to the totals and elect the choice which has a majority (or the most votes if more than one choice reaches a majority).

  4. Keep adding the next rank to the totals until either there is a winner or all ballots are exhausted.

  5. When all ballots are exhausted the choice with the highest total wins.

As a Tie Breaker

The Tie Breaker Method is modified.

Instead of Majority, any choice with a current total less than another is eliminated. This allows resolution of any number of choices in a tie.

The winner is the last choice remaining.


  my $resolve = $Election->TieBreakerGrandJunction( $choice1, $choice2 [ $choice3 ... ]  );
  if ( $resolve->{'winner'}) { say "Tie Winner is $resolve->{'winner'}"}
  elsif ( $resolve->{'tie'}) {
    my @tied = $resolve->{'tied'}->@*;
    say "Still tied between @tied."

The Tie Breaking will be logged to the verbose log, any number of tied choices may be provided.

Borda-like Later Harm Protected

This method is superficially similar to Borda. However, it only scores the best ranked member of the tie, ignoring the later votes. The tie member with the highest score wins. The original position on the ballot is used to score. It is subject to all of the Borda weighting problems. It is Later Harm Protected (within the tied set), but less resolvable than Modified Grand Junction.

TieBreakerBordalikeLaterHarm ()

  Currently unimplemented ...


Implements some basic methods for resolving ties. The default value for IRV is 'all', and the default value for Matrix is 'none'. 'all' is inappropriate for Matrix, and 'none' is inappropriate for IRV.

  my @keep = $self->TieBreaker( $tiebreaker, $active, @choices );

TieBreaker returns a list containing the winner, if the method is 'none' the list is empty, if 'all' the original @choices list is returned. If the TieBreaker is a tie there will be multiple elements.



John Karr (BRAINBUZ)


Copyright 2019 by John Karr (BRAINBUZ)


This module is released under the GNU Public License Version 3. See license file for details. For more information on this license visit