[EM] IRV vs RCV

[robert bristow-johnson]

> On December 13, 2019 11:53 PM fdpk69p6uq at snkmail.com wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 11:39 PM Rob Lanphier wrote:
> > Should we just
> >  do what all of the cool kids are doing, and start referring to it as
> >  "Ranked Choice Voting"?
> 
> 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 at audioimagination.com
 
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."