If all three of Lief, Bore, and Matt are tied in first preferences, it immediately goes to a new runoff election with all three of them! Fun fact: the runoff part of CESRA says you can only vote for one candidate, and that a candidate must have a majority to win. Even in a three man race!
Also, say the vote spread ends up like it was on an earlier count: something like Lief 6, Matt 5, Bore 5. The first way to break the tie between Matt and Bore is to look at how many total preferences they got from every voter, no matter how low of a preference it might be.
So a vote like this doesn't count for Matt in this tiebreaker:
However, a vote like this
would count for Matt to win the tie, even if all of Bore's votes will subsequently flow to Matt and cause Lief to lose:
Also,
none of the votes below count for
either candidate in the tiebreaker
Basically the tiebreaker is literally just "whose voters were less likely to bother to fill out their ballot?" and not anything that's a substantially meaningful tiebreaker. Not even "who had more support in a previous round" (although that wouldn't be applicable here)
What if, in the above example, Matt and Bore are tied for second place, and also tied in their total number of preferences? You know who breaks the tie then?
The Senate! They would literally have to be rounded up so they can break the tie by voting for one of them over the other (so Senators from the Northeast would get two votes!) There are no further steps or anything- "part two" in breaking ties is literally "ok the other thing didn't work so the senate can pick a winner for us".
This all seems kind of ridiculous and we should probably change it. Assuming Lumine maintains his lead and wins, I will run in the Special Election to replace him and a bill fixing this silliness is the first thing I would propose.