Flag notes
So, the preliminary count is up and it’s a victory for opinion polling, if not aesthetics.
As the UMR poll predicted, the two Lockwood ferns were very close, and everything else was well back. Red Peak did a bit worse than in the opinion poll.
It’s notable that each of the two Lockwood ferns got more votes than Red Peak, Hypnoflag, Qualmark Fern, Informal, and Invalid put together.
It is, of course, theoretically possible that there is a Condorcet winner other than one of the Lockwood ferns, because almost anything is theoretically possible in voting-system maths. All you’d need is about three-quarters of the votes ending up at each fern at stage 3 to have Red Peak rather than the other fern next on their preference list.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »