@jkm.eth makes a really brilliant point here that I think completely closes this loop. I want to thank James for stepping in to clarify this, because as I mentioned before, I am not an expert on voting theory and pretty much doing the research on the go on the mechanics behind those approaches.
So they way I see the situation is as follows: given that Stewards and broad team of contributors who actually built the Copeland voting architecture for SPP2, I think we should defer to their conceptual vision of how the mechanism shouldâve functioned.
To quote this as well:
@netto.eth I appreciate you stepping up and owning the coordination mistake regarding Snapshotâs implementation, these things happen and as a DAO we learn from them. But looking at the point @jkm.eth just pointed out, it becomes clear why that SPP2 Average Support formula was completely incompatible with this steward election.
So the way I understand the situation is that SPP2 vote was a highly specific, custom-built mechanism designed by the DAO for distributing a massive budget. In that scenario, the ânone belowâ option was required to act as a cutoff, once below cutoff they were not included in average support calculation at all. These were considered âunrankedâ and received zero votes from that voter.
Without that ânone belowâ cut off line in current election, that specific Average Support formula becomes distorted and stops measuring what it was intended to measure originally. My understanding (correct me if Iâm wrong) if we apply Average support now then it artificially inflates the score of whoever happened to be least liked, voters couldâve chosen to put them below cutoff line, but they didnât have the option.
The election process itself, with the Copeland mechanism applied, was essentially valid. There is nothing wrong with the shielded data we collected. It just that applying retroactively custom SPP2 Average Support metric here is conceptually incorrect.
But I think important point here is that Iâm not inventing a wheel here
If we look at how this is handled in real life in the majority of similar scenarios where competitors are matched up against everyone else - pretty much any sport if you will - the universal, standard way to break a tie in points is to look at the direct head to head record between the tied competitors.
We donât need to invent a new custom tie-breaker or force delegates into a rerun, because that head to head matchup already happened inside this exact election. And in that direct matchup, the raw data shows the delegates preferred me by a definitive margin of 928k to 516k.
If we invalidate a perfectly legitimate election outcome and force the delegates into a rerun just to cover up an administrative and conceptual error, that is setting a bad precedent. The most logical path forward that protects the integrity of the voters effort and time spent deciding on candidates is to simply honor that definitive head to head ledger data, exactly as it is done in almost every similar real world scenario.