Anthony Towns said: <excellent analysis snipped>
Or at least if people don't understand the issue, they think they understand it. ;-) Good, then. :-)Fundamentally, what it requires is for very few people to express full preferences. There're only two reasons for this: one is that most people don't understand the issue, which isn't what happens in Debian;
and the other is that they see some benefit in voting against their true preferences.
And for large X and Y, the above example is very unstable; and I don't believe it could realistically be used as a strategy.
I agree.
So, in this situation, how would you feel if only Q-1 developers voted for C, but lots of other people voted C at equal rank to D?Tough luck. It's not remotely difficult to get Q developers to rank an option higher than "further discussion".
In that case, I withdraw all objections and proposal changes. As long as everyone's aware of the issue, if it appears to be an extremely remote possibility (and you've made a very good case that it is) then no need to worry about it.
If actual instances happen of an option other than the default become the winner due to the 'quorum' (where something else would have won without it), then I'm sure someone will bring this up again, but it does seem extremely unlikely.
--Nathanael