Hi folks,

This morning, I updated the FairVote page on Electowiki:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/FairVote

...which was an updated copy of the intro from the Wikipedia article
about FairVote.  They changed their name in 2004 (from Center for
Voting and Democracy), and it's about time we finally updated
Electowiki to reflect that.

However, one line got under my skin:

Well, there's a lot of good reasons for them to change their name, but
reflecting their support for "ranked choice voting" seemed revisionist
to me.  So I disappeared down a rabbit hole to make my edits to the
Electowiki version.

If you're interested in the details, I encourage you to read my longer
history on Electowiki, but here's the abbreviated timeline:

• 1992 - "Center for Proportional Representation" (CPR) is formed
• 1993 - CPR changes its name to "Center for Voting and Democracy" (CVD)
• 1993 - Report published, calling it "preference voting" (in a nod to
  Australia)
• 1997 - first use of "Instant Runoff voting" that I could find
• 2000 - http://fairvote.org/irv URL goes live on CVD's website
• 2004 - CVD changes its name to "FairVote"
• 2006 - http://fairvote.org/rcv URL goes live on FairVote's website,
  in cooperation with the Arizona League of Women Voters
• 2013 - FairVote starts referring to IRV primarily as "Ranked Choice Votting"

What happened between 2006 and 2013 is left as an exercise for the reader.

At any rate: is this a problem worth worrying about?  Should we just
do what all of the cool kids are doing, and start referring to it as
"Ranked Choice Voting"?  I mean, come on, Jennifer Lawrence and Krist
Novaselic are on board (ok, since Jennifer Lawrence was born in the
90s, I have no problem referring to her as a "kid", but Krist
Novoselic is older than I am, so should I be respecting my elders?)

Rob

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 11:39 PM Rob Lanphier wrote:

No, that misleads people into focusing only on the ranked ballot, while
remaining ignorant of the way(s) the ballots are tallied.  While FairVote
may have good marketing reasons for doing that, it's not beneficial from a
theory/education perspective.  Extra-confusingly, FairVote uses the same
term for both single-winner IRV and multi-winner STV, though they produce
different kinds of representation (such as Australia's House vs Senate).

i am also unhappy and negatively impressed with FairVote for appropriating the term Ranked-Choice Voting to replace the previous label Instant-Runoff Voting which has accumulated some negative cache.  They have always introduced the ranked ballot as only tallyable using IRV rules and appropriating the more general term RCV even more so conveys that misrepresentation.  FairVote is making it harder for people to unlearn that false connection.

but things are hard to change with election law.  while i like Ranked Pairs (using margins) better, i can see value in BTR-STV as a means to get a Condorcet-compliant method adopted as law.  We can say to the followers of FairVote that it's IRV with rounds.  And we can say it fixes the problem of risk of not electing the Condorcet candidate (if there is one).  it's Condorcet-compliant IRV and i wouldn't mind if they called that "RCV".

--

r b-j                  rbj@audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 9:21 PM robert bristow-johnson
rbj@audioimagination.com wrote:

Yeah, I totally agree with all of this.  I also like Ranked Pairs, but
I suspect that all of the methods that pick a candidate out of the
Smith set are indistinguishable in real-world conditions.  My hunch is
that an analysis of the public elections that had ranked ballots would
reveal that all of them had a single Condorcet winner, and therefore
there would be no difference between the results of Ranked Pairs,
Schulze, Tideman, Schulze, or even Copeland.  So BTR-STV seems like a
fine compromise, since IRV has failed to pick the Condorcet winner in
at least one recent public election.

Rob

Is RCV (Ranked Choice Voting) really the same as IRV (Instant Run-off Voting)?

IRV (with preferential voting) surely had its origin as a replacement for successive (or top-two) FPTP run-off votes to determine
the winner in single-winner elections.  This single-winner application of STV preferential voting is known in some parts of the
world as the Alternative Vote, but that name never caught on in the USA.

Does RCV include multi-winner elections, i.e. STV-PR = preferential voting in multi-member electoral districts?

James Gilmour
Edinburgh, Scotland

On 12/14/19 5:39 AM, Rob Lanphier wrote:

I'm thinking something that happened in 2009 was influential :-)

From a purely descriptive perspective, "ranked choice voting" is voting
which involves choices arranged in ranks, so pretty much every kind of
ranked ballot would count. I'd be inclined to suspect that FairVote
calls IRV RCV to try to cement a link between ranked voting (the ballot
format) and IRV (their method).

I don't see that there's a reason to do this. I'd suggest that RCV or
Ranked choice voting direct to some page about ranked balloting, and
then have a Wikipedia-style disambiguation line at top saying something
like "This is about the ranked ballot format, to see the method FairVote
calls Ranked Choice Voting, go to [Instant Runoff Voting]".

To try to be generous to the other side, I could say that some methods'
names aren't entirely descriptive (e.g. Ranked Pairs), and that "ranked
choice voting" (why not just "ranked voting"?) is an odd term for the
general concept of ranked balloting. Such arguments would strengthen the
case for letting FairVote use RCV as a brand name for IRV/STV. But on
the balance, I think doing so gives FairVote too much of a say in just
what method ranked balloting should use.

except, of course, Burlington Vermont 2009.

this is the difficult point i have tried to say here.  i think that Schulze is likely the most resistant to voting strategy, but it's too difficult to explain to legislators and the public.

BTR-STV is different.  Schulze, RP, MinMax (dunno about Copeland) all elect the same candidate in the case of an CW or a Smith set of 3.  i don't ever ever ever expect to see a Condorcet RCV ever have a Smith set larger than and i really don't expect to see one without a CW.

yes, and i am trying to remind the Progs of that.  but they are not listening.

--

r b-j                  rbj@audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

James,

In the United States, the name RCV was adopted because some activists
wanted an umbrella term that would refer to both IRV and STV together --
and also not sound too technical. There are both pros and cons to this
as a political strategy. One of the several motivations was the belief
that voters and politicians could become accustomed to IRV --
politically a much easier reform to win -- and then persuaded to adopt
STV for the legislative branch later on.

--Bob Richard

------ Original Message ------
From: "James Gilmour" jgilmour@globalnet.co.uk
To: "'Rob Lanphier'" robla@robla.net; "'Election Methods'"
election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Sent: 12/14/2019 6:26:13 AM
Subject: Re: [EM] IRV vs RCV

I just edited the Wikipedia page named "Ranked voting" to clarify that
it refers to using ranked ballots.  That's an edit that was already
discussed on the "talk" page for that article.  Previously the article
almost looked like a promo for Ranked Choice voting.

I don't like FairVote using the name "Ranked Choice voting," yet
fighting that name seems wasteful.

Instead I tell people we needed "ranked ballots and pairwise counting."
That separation of ballot type from counting method seems to help people
understand that ranked ballots can be counted in more than one way --
which is a point that's now stated in the "Ranked voting" Wikipedia article.

The article still needs further work, such as filling in the Condorcet
section, so anyone is welcome to improve it.  (I'm juggling multiple
projects so I just fixed the biggest problem.)

Richard Fobes

On 12/13/2019 8:39 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:

On Sat, Dec 14, 2019 at 7:21 AM robert bristow-johnson
rbj@audioimagination.com wrote:

I'm pretty sure all of the Condorcet-winner compliant methods chose
Andy Montroll, given the ballots from the Burlington 2009 election.
Copeland, Schulze, Ranked Pairs,  etc.  Was there a discrepency
between Condorcet methods, or just the well-documented discrepency
between the Condorcet methods and IRV?

Yeah, I agree.  I'm willing to take it on faith that BTR-STV is more
susceptible to strategy than methods that guarantee Smith set
membership, but I suspect that Condorcet-compliant methods perform
better at strategy resistance than standard IRV does.

Copeland isn't guaranteed to pick a candidate out of the Smith set
when the Smith set is bigger than one, so it's possible it'll pick a
different winner than Schulze, RP, MinMax, etc when the Smith set is
3.

sigh.  Yeah, sounds tough.  We had a close mayoral election here in
San Francisco in 2018.  Given how close it was, I was really terrified
that we'd end up with an election like Burlington 2009.  Thankfully,
the IRV elimination order didn't threaten to eliminate the Condorcet
winner.  The closeness of the race was between two candidates who
probably would have been the final two candidates in a BTR-IRV tally
(though the third place candidate wasn't far behind either of the
frontrunners).  Given the closeness bitterness of the race, it would
have been an electoral reform disaster if any of the top three
candidates had lost the way that Andy Montroll did in Burlington (as
the Condorcet winner and IRV loser).

Rob