Individual Reporting of Vote Result

[Steve Eppley]

Marcus G wrote:
-snip-
>Despite using compulsory Preferential Voting all my life I had
>never heard it described as Instant-Runoff and the abbreviation MPV
>meant nothing to me 
-snip-

Instant Runoff is a name coined a some months ago by the Center for
Voting and Democracy, I think.  Perhaps by Rob Ritchie.  They have
the opinion that it will help people understand the algorithm better
than MPV (which I think stands for Majority Preference Voting, a
fairly meaningless term) would, since people are familiar with
runoffs between the top 2 vote-getters when no one polled a
majority.

That opinion is hard to prove or disprove.  My opinion is that the
name Instant Runoffs would be useful for pairwise methods in general
or Condorcet (or Smith-Condorcet) in particular, since the pairings
are "virtual runoffs", but I doubt those who like using Instant
Runoff for MPV would be willing to cede the name.  Maybe we could
have a vote (in the ER list?) about which is the better usage. 

---Steve     (Steve Eppley    seppley at alumni.caltech.edu)