[EM] "Instant-runoff voting" article renamed to "Ranked-choice voting" on English Wikipedia

[Joseph Malkevitch]

Precise definitions are helpful but often require more words and care than people take.

What is the area of a circle?

Many mathematicians would answer zero since for them whether you meant a Euclidean or taxicab metric circle, or a circle based on some other distance function, a circle is a "wire" or piece of string, which is one dimensional and will have zero area - though the meaning of the word area is not so easy. It would better to ask for the area of the region enclosed by a Euclidean circle if the answer you had in mind was (pi)r^2.

IRV can mean different things to different people and as a system can have a different "feel" depending on whether one allows voters to rank different choices at the same "level" and/or "truncate" by not ranking all the candidates. I have sometimes used the phrase "sequential run-off" for this method but that is sloppy because one can design sequential run-off methds based  on first place votes, last place votes or the "Borda Count."

Definitions can be chosen for clarity, brevity, to mislead or confuse, etc.

Regards,

Joe

——————————————
Joseph Malkevitch

Email:
jmalkevitch at york.cuny.edu
Web page:
http://york.cuny.edu/~malk/






________________________________
From: Election-Methods <election-methods-bounces at lists.electorama.com> on behalf of Closed Limelike Curves <closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, October 18, 2024 1:05 PM
To: Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km-elmet at munsterhjelm.no>
Cc: Chris Benham <cbenhamau at yahoo.com.au>; election-methods at lists.electorama.com <election-methods at lists.electorama.com>; Rob Lanphier <roblan at 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 at munsterhjelm.no<mailto:km-elmet at 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
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