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

[Ralph Suter]

You're just wrong about this, Closed. I don't know the full history of 
the name IRV and how it became better known as RCV, but in the late '90 
and at least the first decade of the 2000's, IRV not only "caught on" 
but was widely used in discussions of voting methods, and not just among 
"voting theory circles" and FairVote, which at the time was named the 
Center for Voting and Democracy. You are apparently too young to have 
first-hand knowledge of any of that. I attended the 1992 founding 
meeting of what is now known as FairVote but  was originally named 
Citizens for Proportional Representation (CPR). The founding meeting was 
focused primarily on PR rather than single winner/one rep per district 
reform, which was discussed very little at the meeting. That soon 
changed when shortly after the meeting (or maybe shortly before, I'm not 
certain), former U.S. representative and 1980 presidential candidate 
John Anderson published a 1992 article (I think in NY Times or maybe 
Wash Post) advocating what is now known as RCV. Anderson soon joined and 
became a leader of CPR and apparently was very influential in getting it 
to focus less on PR and more on single winner reform and change its name 
to CVD.

-Ralph Suter

On 10/18/2024 3:02 PM, election-methods-request at lists.electorama.com wrote:
> Message: 9
> Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2024 10:05:55 -0700
> From: Closed Limelike Curves<closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com>
> 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
> Message-ID:
> 	<CA+euzPirVPAsSfM=BxboPoX_oeUUmZeGYwTRMFpTk3o40ab0Ng at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> 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> 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
>> ----
>> Election-Methods mailing list - seehttps://electorama.com/em for list
>> info
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