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

[Joseph Malkevitch]

Whatever its faults, Google Scholar gives very focused information to scholarly articles about elections and voting when compared with the "general" Google search engine.

For me the problem with the use of the name RCV, ranked choice voting, is that it suggests that  a ballot which allows the voter to "rank" choices is used but offers no clue about what decision procedure is used to get a "winner" based on the ballots.  To model voting one needs to specify a ballot type and specify a "decision" method. Work of Arrow and other scholars chart what desirable and undesirable features different systems obey.

Regards,

Joe

________________________________
From: Closed Limelike Curves <closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 20, 2024 2:54 PM
To: Joseph Malkevitch <jmalkevitch at york.cuny.edu>
Cc: EM <election-methods at lists.electorama.com>
Subject: Re: [EM] "Instant-runoff voting" article renamed to "Ranked-choice voting" on English Wikipedia

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Google page counts are often off by orders of magnitude, unfortunately.

But I'm also not saying no academics use the term IRV, just that, in recent years, "RCV" is definitely dominant.

On Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 2:13 PM Joseph Malkevitch <jmalkevitch at york.cuny.edu<mailto:jmalkevitch at york.cuny.edu>> wrote:
For amusement, a few minutes ago I entered the string

IRV voting

 into

Google Scholar

And it claimed to find "about" 14500 citations.

Regards,

Joe
——————————————
Joseph Malkevitch

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

________________________________
From: Election-Methods <election-methods-bounces at lists.electorama.com<mailto:election-methods-bounces at lists.electorama.com>> on behalf of Closed Limelike Curves <closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com<mailto:closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com>>
Sent: Friday, October 18, 2024 4:12 PM

To: Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km-elmet at munsterhjelm.no<mailto:km-elmet at munsterhjelm.no>>
Cc: Chris Benham <cbenhamau at yahoo.com.au<mailto:cbenhamau at yahoo.com.au>>; election-methods at lists.electorama.com<mailto:election-methods at lists.electorama.com> <election-methods at lists.electorama.com<mailto:election-methods at lists.electorama.com>>; Rob Lanphier <roblan at gmail.com<mailto:roblan at gmail.com>>
Subject: Re: [EM] "Instant-runoff voting" article renamed to "Ranked-choice voting" on English Wikipedia


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But, in any case, my main comments on this are that Wikipedia policy is actually very clear on this issue.
1. Wikipedia requires using the common name for a thing, even if it's a misnomer or less-than-ideal. For example, the articles are titled "morning sickness" and "Panama hat" instead of "Nausea and vomiting of pregnancy" or "That hat from Ecuador sometimes called a Panama hat". This helps both with search results and with ensuring neutrality in naming disputes: the San Francisco Board of Elections would argue "RCV" is accurate because voters do rank the candidates, but that "IRV" is inaccurate because the results aren't instantly available.
2. Wikipedia requires following the lead of a majority of reliable sources. Overwhelmingly, reliable sources (e.g. media, academic papers, and so on) use and explicitly define RCV to mean IRV, not ranked voting methods in general.

On Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 10:05 AM Closed Limelike Curves <closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com<mailto:closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com>> wrote:
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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