I'm not sure that invalidates the core of the post, though, since I think a different consensus criterion could be substituted without losing the substance of the game.
It's not about political consensus.
However, the paper that introduced it and proved it possible, Lamport's "The Part Time Parliament", used an involved (and often cited as confusing) "Parliament" metaphor for computers in a distributed system
"Consensus" in distributed systems need not be limited to majorities; it really just requires no "split brain" is possible. For example, "consensus" is achieved by making one server the leader, and giving other servers no say. A majority is just the 'quorum' which remains available with that largest number of unavailable peers possible.
Looking back at the page again from the top, I see the first paragraph references Paxos, which is a clue to those who know what that is, but I think using "There’s a committee of five members that tries to choose a color for a bike shed" as the example, which is the canonical case for people arguing personal preferences and going to the wall for them at the expense of every other rational consideration, threw me back off the trail. I'd suggest perhaps the sample problem being something as trivial as that in reality, but less pre-loaded with the exact opposite connotation.
Which is funny, because that actually describes political consensus as well, functionally, even if it’s not what people typically think of as the definition.
If you can effect enough of the right censorship or silencing or cancelling, you can achieve consensus (aka no split brain, at least no split with agency)
Then we could consider whether all participants have the same voting power. My son has a strong vote on what to paint his room but much less on where to go on holiday.
Need to consider whether the votes could be hidden and revealed at the end to avoid intimidation.
> Here, you asked R0, R2 and R3 to abstain from casting further votes in the first three columns, signified by black x.
If I can ask them to do that, and rely on them to go along with what I ask - why not skip all the middle steps and ask them all to vote for red?
Why did R2 vote on the 6th column instead of the 1st one?
Why not just pick the leftmost column that has tree votes as the winner?