Re: [EM] "Instant-runoff voting" article renamed to, "Ranked-choice voting" on English Wikipedia
You're just wrong about this, Closed. I don't know the full history of
the name IRV and how it became better known as RCV, but in the late '90
and at least the first decade of the 2000's, IRV not only "caught on"
but was widely used in discussions of voting methods, and not just among
"voting theory circles" and FairVote, which at the time was named the
Center for Voting and Democracy. You are apparently too young to have
first-hand knowledge of any of that. I attended the 1992 founding
meeting of what is now known as FairVote but was originally named
Citizens for Proportional Representation (CPR). The founding meeting was
focused primarily on PR rather than single winner/one rep per district
reform, which was discussed very little at the meeting. That soon
changed when shortly after the meeting (or maybe shortly before, I'm not
certain), former U.S. representative and 1980 presidential candidate
John Anderson published a 1992 article (I think in NY Times or maybe
Wash Post) advocating what is now known as RCV. Anderson soon joined and
became a leader of CPR and apparently was very influential in getting it
to focus less on PR and more on single winner reform and change its name
to CVD.
-Ralph Suter
On 10/18/2024 3:02 PM, election-methods-request@lists.electorama.com wrote:
Message: 9
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2024 10:05:55 -0700
From: Closed Limelike Curvesclosed.limelike.curves@gmail.com
To: Kristofer Munsterhjelmkm-elmet@munsterhjelm.no
Cc: Chris Benhamcbenhamau@yahoo.com.au,
"election-methods@lists.electorama.com"
election-methods@lists.electorama.com, Rob Lanphier
roblan@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [EM] "Instant-runoff voting" article renamed to
"Ranked-choice voting" on English Wikipedia
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CA+euzPirVPAsSfM=BxboPoX_oeUUmZeGYwTRMFpTk3o40ab0Ng@mail.gmail.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
The Electowiki article covers this. The name IRV is a promotional name
pushed by FairVote in the early 2000s. The name never really caught on and
was never used by anyone but FairVote and Wikipedia, because the first
place to adopt it (San Francisco) renamed it "Ranked-choice voting" because
they thought the name IRV would confuse people into expecting the results
to be released "instantly" (immediately after polls closed). The term IRV
has never seen much widespread use outside voting theory circles and
FairVote.
On Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 9:09?AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
km-elmet@munsterhjelm.no> wrote:
On 2024-10-18 17:38, Chris Benham wrote:
I gather that "Instant Runoff Voting" was originally a promotional name
in the US that after being used for a long time was changed (for some
reason I forget) to Ranked Choice Voting.
From what I understand, one of the public-facing organizations (might
have been the LWV) suggested the name because, to the voter, the
characteristic feature is that you rank the candidates. And then
FairVote found out that it helped their advocacy, so it stuck.
-km
Election-Methods mailing list - seehttps://electorama.com/em for list
info
I'm not sure what part of my email you're disagreeing with here. To be
clear, when I say it never "caught on" I just mean most people have never
heard of that name, whereas probably a bare majority of people today have
heard of the term "ranked-choice voting". Honestly, I'd describe anyone who
knew about non-FPP voting systems before 2010 as a voting nerd.
On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 2:30 PM Ralph Suter RLSuter@aol.com wrote:
You're just wrong about this, Closed. I don't know the full history of the
name IRV and how it became better known as RCV, but in the late '90 and at
least the first decade of the 2000's, IRV not only "caught on" but was
widely used in discussions of voting methods, and not just among "voting
theory circles" and FairVote, which at the time was named the Center for
Voting and Democracy. You are apparently too young to have first-hand
knowledge of any of that. I attended the 1992 founding meeting of what is
now known as FairVote but was originally named Citizens for Proportional
Representation (CPR). The founding meeting was focused primarily on PR
rather than single winner/one rep per district reform, which was discussed
very little at the meeting. That soon changed when shortly after the
meeting (or maybe shortly before, I'm not certain), former U.S.
representative and 1980 presidential candidate John Anderson published a
1992 article (I think in NY Times or maybe Wash Post) advocating what is
now known as RCV. Anderson soon joined and became a leader of CPR and
apparently was very influential in getting it to focus less on PR and more
on single winner reform and change its name to CVD.
-Ralph Suter
On 10/18/2024 3:02 PM, election-methods-request@lists.electorama.com
wrote:
Message: 9
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2024 10:05:55 -0700
From: Closed Limelike Curves closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com
To: Kristofer Munsterhjelm km-elmet@munsterhjelm.no km-elmet@munsterhjelm.no
Cc: Chris Benham cbenhamau@yahoo.com.au cbenhamau@yahoo.com.au,
"election-methods@lists.electorama.com" election-methods@lists.electorama.com
election-methods@lists.electorama.com election-methods@lists.electorama.com, Rob Lanphier
roblan@gmail.com roblan@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [EM] "Instant-runoff voting" article renamed to
"Ranked-choice voting" on English Wikipedia
Message-ID:
CA+euzPirVPAsSfM=BxboPoX_oeUUmZeGYwTRMFpTk3o40ab0Ng@mail.gmail.com CA+euzPirVPAsSfM=BxboPoX_oeUUmZeGYwTRMFpTk3o40ab0Ng@mail.gmail.com
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The Electowiki article covers this. The name IRV is a promotional name
pushed by FairVote in the early 2000s. The name never really caught on and
was never used by anyone but FairVote and Wikipedia, because the first
place to adopt it (San Francisco) renamed it "Ranked-choice voting" because
they thought the name IRV would confuse people into expecting the results
to be released "instantly" (immediately after polls closed). The term IRV
has never seen much widespread use outside voting theory circles and
FairVote.
On Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 9:09?AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm km-elmet@munsterhjelm.no wrote:
On 2024-10-18 17:38, Chris Benham wrote:
I gather that "Instant Runoff Voting" was originally a promotional name
in the US that after being used for a long time was changed (for some
reason I forget) to Ranked Choice Voting.
From what I understand, one of the public-facing organizations (might
have been the LWV) suggested the name because, to the voter, the
characteristic feature is that you rank the candidates. And then
FairVote found out that it helped their advocacy, so it stuck.
-km
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
info
Between the late 1990s and mid 2010s, Rob Richie got hundreds of
articles advocating instant runoff voting published in major national
newspapers including NYT and WaPost and many papers in large cities as
well as smaller ones around the country. Are all the many thousands of
people (probably hundreds of thousands if not millions) who read some of
those articles "voting nerds"?! Furthermore, the term "instant runoff"
is still widely used, as in a recent (10/3/24) WaPost editorial
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/03/ranked-choice-instant-runoff-ballot-initiatives-dc/),
which describes the process of determining a winner as "sometimes known
as an “instant runoff,” or as in an even more recent (10/18) Chicago
Sun-Times opinion article
(https://chicago.suntimes.com/democracy/2024/10/18/ranked-choice-voting-democracy-reform-alexandra-copper-trevor-potter-campaign-legal-center),
which explains that "This “instant runoff” continues until one candidate
wins a majority." Following that article is also a reference to a
detailed and extensively documented University of Chicago primer
(https://effectivegov.uchicago.edu/primers/ranked-choice-voting) that
explains that "RCV goes by many other names, including instant runoff
voting (IRV), the alternative vote (AV), and preferential voting." As I
said, what you said in your email was just wrong. If you're going to
write about the history of IRV/RCV and put it in wiki articles, you need
to do so accurately. To describe IRV as merely a "promotional name
pushed by FairVote in the early 2000's" (the organization's name was
actually the Center for Voting and Democracy until 2004) and that the
name has "never seen much widespread use outside of theory circles" is
just egregiously inaccurate.
Furthermore, even though you may be right about how the name IRV got
changed to RCV (I hadn't heard the story about LWV's influence on
FairVote) and that it is now in such widespread use that it's the
"common name" for what used to be commonly named IRV, that may not be
true for much longer. Right now, there are no organizations I know of
that are advocating other kinds of ranked choice voting (let me know if
there are any I don't know of), but there could soon be.
Condorcet/ranked-pair methods, which some people have suggested calling
instant-round-robin voting (IRRV) for advocacy purposes, was once
impractical to implement compared to IRV because of the complexity of
the ballot counting process, but scanned paper ballots and good voting
machines that produce paper printouts combined with computer technology
that wasn't available when IRV/preferential was first adopted in
Australia and elsewhere now make IRRV a very viable alternative to IRV.
Furthermore, IRRV is a lot more reliably accurate, as has been explained
extensively on this list. IRV's failure in the 2022 Alaska election for
U.S. representative, as explained in an 11/1/2022 WaPost opinion article
by two well-known experts, Edward Foley and Eric Maskin, should have
been enough to sow widespread doubt about IRV as now used. (The WaPost
board probably forgot about that article). IRRV also has the great
advantage of precinct summability (a better name is needed for advocacy
purposes), which means that unlike IRV, an election winner can be
accurately predicted long before all ballots are in unless an election
is very close. Because of its advantages, IRRV would also be very useful
for doing polling, while IRV wouldn't be useful at all for polling.
So a few years from now, advocates of what's now known as RCV may be
forced to pick a more accurate name or else take care to regularly
explain that there are competing forms of ranked voting other people are
advocating. It's even possible that in a few years, the deficiencies of
IRV become so clear and the comparative advantages of other form of
ranked voting as well as the advantages of some non-ranking methods like
approval voting and variants of it become so clear that IRV ends up in
the "dustbin of history" where, in my opinion and the opinion of many
other contributors to list, including yourself I believe think it belongs.
By the way, the John Anderson article I mentioned was published in NYT
July 24, 1992
(https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/24/opinion/break-the-political-stranglehold.html),
about a month after the Cincinnati founding meeting of CPR. He used the
term "majority preferential voting" since IRV was not used widely if at
all at the time. It's actually a very good article and could easily be
adapted with minor changes for use by IRV advocates today.
-Ralph Suter
On 10/23/2024 11:39 AM, Closed Limelike Curves wrote:
I'm not sure what part of my email you're disagreeing with here. To be
clear, when I say it never "caught on" I just mean most people have
never heard of that name, whereas probably a bare majority of people
today have heard of the term "ranked-choice voting". Honestly, I'd
describe anyone who knew about non-FPP voting systems before 2010 as a
voting nerd.
On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 2:30 PM Ralph Suter RLSuter@aol.com wrote:
You're just wrong about this, Closed. I don't know the full
history of the name IRV and how it became better known as RCV, but
in the late '90 and at least the first decade of the 2000's, IRV
not only "caught on" but was widely used in discussions of voting
methods, and not just among "voting theory circles" and FairVote,
which at the time was named the Center for Voting and Democracy.
You are apparently too young to have first-hand knowledge of any
of that. I attended the 1992 founding meeting of what is now known
as FairVote but was originally named Citizens for Proportional
Representation (CPR). The founding meeting was focused primarily
on PR rather than single winner/one rep per district reform, which
was discussed very little at the meeting. That soon changed when
shortly after the meeting (or maybe shortly before, I'm not
certain), former U.S. representative and 1980 presidential
candidate John Anderson published a 1992 article (I think in NY
Times or maybe Wash Post) advocating what is now known as RCV.
Anderson soon joined and became a leader of CPR and apparently was
very influential in getting it to focus less on PR and more on
single winner reform and change its name to CVD.
-Ralph Suter
On 10/18/2024 3:02 PM,
election-methods-request@lists.electorama.com wrote:
Message: 9
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2024 10:05:55 -0700
From: Closed Limelike Curves<closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com> <mailto:closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com>
To: Kristofer Munsterhjelm<km-elmet@munsterhjelm.no> <mailto:km-elmet@munsterhjelm.no>
Cc: Chris Benham<cbenhamau@yahoo.com.au> <mailto:cbenhamau@yahoo.com.au>,
"election-methods@lists.electorama.com" <mailto:election-methods@lists.electorama.com>
<election-methods@lists.electorama.com> <mailto:election-methods@lists.electorama.com>, Rob Lanphier
<roblan@gmail.com> <mailto:roblan@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [EM] "Instant-runoff voting" article renamed to
"Ranked-choice voting" on English Wikipedia
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The Electowiki article covers this. The name IRV is a promotional name
pushed by FairVote in the early 2000s. The name never really caught on and
was never used by anyone but FairVote and Wikipedia, because the first
place to adopt it (San Francisco) renamed it "Ranked-choice voting" because
they thought the name IRV would confuse people into expecting the results
to be released "instantly" (immediately after polls closed). The term IRV
has never seen much widespread use outside voting theory circles and
FairVote.
On Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 9:09?AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
km-elmet@munsterhjelm.no> wrote:
On 2024-10-18 17:38, Chris Benham wrote:
I gather that "Instant Runoff Voting" was originally a promotional name
in the US that after being used for a long time was changed (for some
reason I forget) to Ranked Choice Voting.
From what I understand, one of the public-facing organizations (might
have been the LWV) suggested the name because, to the voter, the
characteristic feature is that you rank the candidates. And then
FairVote found out that it helped their advocacy, so it stuck.
-km
----
Election-Methods mailing list - seehttps://electorama.com/em for list
info