The best way is the way that it was done in June 2009. Lief had 1 more first preference than PiT. GPorter was eliminated and his 1 vote went to PiT, producing a tie in the second count. Lief was declared the winner because he had the most first preferences.
This is the way that ties have historically been broken in the past in Atlasia
MasterJedi that same election was reelected to Midwest Senate in a similar fashion. He got 8 first preference votes I think and the final count produced a single other candidate with 8 votes, Jedi was declared the winner again because he had more first preferences.
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I don't like the idea of the House or Senate getting to make the decision because they will always select the majority party's candidate not who the people expressed the most support for.
Poirot is right - historically we've been doing tiebreakers wrong for a very long time. This legal language is exactly the same as what governed tiebreakers back in 2009, because I remember after I discovered we had been misinterpreting the law (I don't remember when that was, but it was when I told Poirot - maybe 2013?), I looked back and saw Lief and I were wrongfully elected in 2009 when we should have gone into a runoff against PiT! When someone linked me to the current election law last night I immediately recognized it as the very same law that had been misinterpreted back then.
I do remember looking way back to see what the "intent" was of the Atlasians of yesteryear who actually wrote the law, and I saw for the first year or two afterwards, runoffs were indeed done like the law says they're supposed to according to my understanding of the law (of course, back then when we only had federal elections with only 20 voters, ties were much more common!).
If I had to guess I'd suggest we probably lost the correct interpretation when Gabu left the forum - he had been singlehandedly running federal elections for a long time. Interestingly, IIRC the winner in a tie was misunderstood to be "whoever had more preferences in the previous round" before it was misinterpreted to be "whoever had more first preferences" (and at one point it was even somehow misunderstood to be "whoever is preferenced at any level among the most ballots".
I agree the correct runoff rule - as well as all the wrong ways that tiebreakers have incorrectly been done in the past - are all flawed and none of them really seem to be objectively fair. If I can suggest a superior method, it would be some pseudo-random algorithm anyone could do to figure out the winner of a tie.
e.g. perhaps something to the effect of:
"the sum of the letters in both candidate's usernames, multiplied by the the last two digits in the post time of the most recent vote, minus the User ID of the most recent officeholder of the office being elected, then the digits are added together, and if the resulting number is odd the winner is the candidate who has been a member of Atlasia longer, and if it's even it goes to the newer member"
or anything like that, unambiguous and specific so it can reliably provide a clear winner in a way that can't be gamed or faked
