[EM] I could use some help with advocacy.

[VoteFair]

I'm not suggesting re-naming the academic name for "Bottom Two Runoff 
IRV," yet I am suggesting that for political discussion purposes you 
come up with something that is easier to say, and easier for a 
non-academic person to remember.

So, here are some off-the-top-of-my-head name ideas for BTR-IRV:

Ranked Choice With Bottom Two Runoff  (RCWBTR)

If IRV is "Ranked Choice Hare" then:

Ranked Choice Beyond Hare (RCBH)

Ranked Choice Better Than Hare (RCBTH)

Admittedly some of these suggestions (and others that come to mind) are 
half-silly. Yet I'm sure other folks here can suggest better names.

As a reminder, the person who was hired to promote STAR voting under its 
original name said she would only do the job if they came up with a 
better name, and that's when it became STAR voting.  I don't recall the 
original name.

FYI, STAR advocates sometimes refer to STAR voting as "Ranked Choice 2.0".

Names do make a difference.

BTW, I avoid the word "Condorcet" when discussing Ranked Choice 
Including Pairwise Elimination (RCIPE) because the FairVote folks have 
poisoned that word.  Also, it refers to Condorcet winners whereas RCIPE 
eliminates Condorcet losers, and does not always yield a Condorcet winner.

I do use the word "pairwise" which is self-descriptive.  And when first 
referring to pairwise vote counting, I may mention "one-on-one matches" 
along with a soccer team analogy.

I and others are also working toward an animated video that demonstrates 
RCIPE in a way that does not say or show any numbers.  It will just show 
stacks of ballots, with the different heights visually indicating the 
number of ballots.  As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.  I 
suppose that means a video is worth ten thousand words.

Richard Fobes


On 4/15/2021 10:56 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
>
>
>> On 04/15/2021 12:29 PM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 15/04/2021 05.45, VoteFair wrote:
>>> I looked at your proposed wording change and I like the fact that it's a
>>> simple way to improve IRV.  (Anything helps.)
>>>
>>> As I understand it, there's a pairwise comparison between the two
>>> candidates who have the fewest transferred votes, and the loser in that
>>> pair is eliminated.
>>>
>>> Perhaps you should give it a name.  Perhaps one that begins with the
>>> words "Ranked Choice ...".  But not Ranked Choice Including Pairwise
>>> Elimination, aka RCIPE, because that's already in use.
>>
>> It's called BTR-IRV in this post:
>> https://election-methods.electorama.narkive.com/LKfc52OI/an-example-of-btr-stv#post4
>> (Electowiki also has a page on it:
>> https://electowiki.org/wiki/Bottom-Two-Runoff_IRV)
>>
>> That's Bottom Two Runoff (but also "better").
>>
>> The term "ranked choice voting" is too ambiguous for me to tell whether
>> you could just move it right over and call the method BTR-RCV. To me,
>> "ranked choice" sounds like just another way of saying "ranked", but of
>> course, FairVote thinks differently.
>>
>> -km
>
> actually at the top of the thread it was called "BTR-STV".  I include a screenshot, but i dunno if the list will pass attachments. i considered BTR-RCV but i didn't like two "R"s.  i sent Rob LeGrand an email longer ago and i don't think he objected.
>
> because FairVote has ditched "IRV" (because it lost cache) and dishonestly replaced it with the more general term "RCV", I want to associate "IRV" with **only** the Hare (or Ware) method.  Not with a reform that makes in Condorcet compliant.
>
> I credit Hare more than Ware for this method that is in wide use today.  Hare's innovation is the Single Transferrable Vote which gave this method some legal meat on the bones.  Hare kept it generalized for multi-winner elections.  Ware's only contribution was "Hay, let's use this Hare method for single-winner elections."
>
> Because of FairVote's appropriation of "RCV" for the Hare method that they are selling, I want to always differentiate the Hare method from all the other RCV methods (Borda, Bucklin, and the several Condorcet methods).
>
> I believe "Hare RCV" is the best label I can toss in to make sure people know what I am talking about in relation to the now common term "RCV".
>
> My personal favorite Condorcet method is not BTR-STV because it is still sequential rounds and does not allow equal ranking of candidates.  But as I said on this mailing list at least a couple times: **Some** Condorcet RCV is better than any non-Condorcet RCV.  Especially since I am already arguing about a corner case (when Hare RCV did not elect the Condorcet winner).  The difference between the Condorcet methods is the *corner* of the corner case.  Already FairVote is arguing that what happened in Burlington is likely to never happen again and happened only once out of something like 300 RCV elections.
>
> But (with apologies to Markus) what is important is to get a decent Condorcet method into some simple and completely self-contained legal language understandable in the common tongue.  Somewhere on this list someone pointed out BTR-IRV to me (since I was not here in 2006, I only joined after the Burlington 2009 election and it was my current opponent, Terry Bouricius, that told me about this list in 2009).  BTW, he called this my "personal pet project" when he was describing the Charter Change question on the CCTV.  I can find a YouTube link if you're interested.
>
>
>
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