Sort order in the face of crappy location granularity

As I discussed in a previous post, it appear to be the case that IonEarth is calculating people's distance on the trail based on proximity to some point, and those points can be some considerable distance apart.  Because they're as far apart as they are, if you just look at the tabular data it appears that a bunch of teams are all in the same place.  If you look at the tracking map it becomes clear that they're not.  The real problem is that when you try to sort the tabular location by trail mileage (click on the "Mile" column header under "Selected Racers") the results do not look that much like what you see on the map, particularly early in the race before teams are strung out along the trail.  Here's an example, with a few of the leaders having arrived in Yenta and other teams starting to stream in:

I've sorted by trail mile on the tabular listing, and you can see that the Trail Breaker is at around mile 152, and we've got 5 teams plus the Teacher on the Trail "at" mile 59.7, which is the Skwentna checkpoint. However, if you look at the teams at mile 59.7, aside from Ray Redington and Jim Lanier, who really are at the checkpoint, the listing is ordered

• Bill Pinkham
• Jodi Bailey
• DeeDee Jonroe

If you look at the map you'll see it's actually 

• Jodi Bailey
• Bill Pinkham
• DeeDee Jonroe

From the group at mile 54.1 the top few in the tabular listing are

• Cim Smyth
• Jeff King
• Aliy Zirkle
• Trent Herbst

while on the map, it's 

• Kelley Griffin
• Jeff King
• Aliy Zirkle
• Paul Gephardt

What appears to be happening is that within each clump of people at a given trail mile, they're sorting by bib number.  Not super helpful, right?  Could they do better?  I think so, and here's why:

If you're familiar with GPS or you've done much navigating with a compass, you know what "triangulation" means, and you understand that you can pinpoint location by comparing your distance from other points.  In the case of the IonEarth tracker they're already calculating distance from their anchor points in order to place them at one.  If they're closer to the 54.1 point than any other point, then they list them as being at mile 54.1.  In order to determine what they're closest to they need to do the arithmetic to compute distance from other anchor points, as well.

So, this shouldn't be difficult:  Let's say there are two teams both considered to be at mile 39.8.  Musher A is 3 miles from 45.6 and 2.8 miles from 39.8, and musher B is 4 miles from 45.6 and 1.8 miles from 39.8.  It's not that hard to figure that A is leading B.  Frankly computers are pretty good at this kind of stuff, and since IonEarth has to do these calculations anyway, I don't understand why they're not using the results of those calculations to sort trail order correctly.  There may well be a very good reason, or it's possible that there's something entirely different going on in how they calculate trail mileage.  But, I tend to think that the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one, and I think this is what's going on with the Iditarod GPS trackers.