Please correct the record. I read your later post and we track together up to a point. But I don’t understand the rest of your post. Would you mind extrapolating from where I started?
Candidate A:48% B:20% C:17% D:15% -— who wins?
If you’re saying that once D is eliminated then each individual 3rd place vote is recounted and so on... gah. I don’t feel any better about the process.
So after that first round D is eliminated. Every ballot where D was the first vote, we now look at their second votes, and allocate those into the remaining buckets.
So imagine D’s second rank votes went as follows. 3% for A. 11% for B and 1% for C, then the race is over. A now has 51% and he is the victor.
But if D’s second votes were 1% for A, 14% for B and 0% for C, we keep counting, by eliminating C, because we were now at A: 49 , B: 34 and C: 17.
The only way A loses is if 100% of “C” had “A” as their worst choice. If that happened it would be 51 to 49 for B over A.