[EM] "Instant-runoff voting" article renamed to, "Ranked-choice voting" on English Wikipedia
Ralph Suter
RLSuter at aol.com
Wed Oct 23 15:39:03 PDT 2024
Between the late 1990s and mid 2010s, Rob Richie got hundreds of
articles advocating instant runoff voting published in major national
newspapers including NYT and WaPost and many papers in large cities as
well as smaller ones around the country. Are all the many thousands of
people (probably hundreds of thousands if not millions) who read some of
those articles "voting nerds"?! Furthermore, the term "instant runoff"
is still widely used, as in a recent (10/3/24) WaPost editorial
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/03/ranked-choice-instant-runoff-ballot-initiatives-dc/),
which describes the process of determining a winner as "sometimes known
as an “instant runoff,” or as in an even more recent (10/18) Chicago
Sun-Times opinion article
(https://chicago.suntimes.com/democracy/2024/10/18/ranked-choice-voting-democracy-reform-alexandra-copper-trevor-potter-campaign-legal-center),
which explains that "This “instant runoff” continues until one candidate
wins a majority." Following that article is also a reference to a
detailed and extensively documented University of Chicago primer
(https://effectivegov.uchicago.edu/primers/ranked-choice-voting) that
explains that "RCV goes by many other names, including instant runoff
voting (IRV), the alternative vote (AV), and preferential voting." As I
said, what you said in your email was just wrong. If you're going to
write about the history of IRV/RCV and put it in wiki articles, you need
to do so accurately. To describe IRV as merely a "promotional name
pushed by FairVote in the early 2000's" (the organization's name was
actually the Center for Voting and Democracy until 2004) and that the
name has "never seen much widespread use outside of theory circles" is
just egregiously inaccurate.
Furthermore, even though you may be right about how the name IRV got
changed to RCV (I hadn't heard the story about LWV's influence on
FairVote) and that it is now in such widespread use that it's the
"common name" for what used to be commonly named IRV, that may not be
true for much longer. Right now, there are no organizations I know of
that are advocating other kinds of ranked choice voting (let me know if
there are any I don't know of), but there could soon be.
Condorcet/ranked-pair methods, which some people have suggested calling
instant-round-robin voting (IRRV) for advocacy purposes, was once
impractical to implement compared to IRV because of the complexity of
the ballot counting process, but scanned paper ballots and good voting
machines that produce paper printouts combined with computer technology
that wasn't available when IRV/preferential was first adopted in
Australia and elsewhere now make IRRV a very viable alternative to IRV.
Furthermore, IRRV is a lot more reliably accurate, as has been explained
extensively on this list. IRV's failure in the 2022 Alaska election for
U.S. representative, as explained in an 11/1/2022 WaPost opinion article
by two well-known experts, Edward Foley and Eric Maskin, should have
been enough to sow widespread doubt about IRV as now used. (The WaPost
board probably forgot about that article). IRRV also has the great
advantage of precinct summability (a better name is needed for advocacy
purposes), which means that unlike IRV, an election winner can be
accurately predicted long before all ballots are in unless an election
is very close. Because of its advantages, IRRV would also be very useful
for doing polling, while IRV wouldn't be useful at all for polling.
So a few years from now, advocates of what's now known as RCV may be
forced to pick a more accurate name or else take care to regularly
explain that there are competing forms of ranked voting other people are
advocating. It's even possible that in a few years, the deficiencies of
IRV become so clear and the comparative advantages of other form of
ranked voting as well as the advantages of some non-ranking methods like
approval voting and variants of it become so clear that IRV ends up in
the "dustbin of history" where, in my opinion and the opinion of many
other contributors to list, including yourself I believe think it belongs.
By the way, the John Anderson article I mentioned was published in NYT
July 24, 1992
(https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/24/opinion/break-the-political-stranglehold.html),
about a month after the Cincinnati founding meeting of CPR. He used the
term "majority preferential voting" since IRV was not used widely if at
all at the time. It's actually a very good article and could easily be
adapted with minor changes for use by IRV advocates today.
-Ralph Suter
On 10/23/2024 11:39 AM, Closed Limelike Curves wrote:
> I'm not sure what part of my email you're disagreeing with here. To be
> clear, when I say it never "caught on" I just mean most people have
> never heard of that name, whereas probably a bare majority of people
> today have heard of the term "ranked-choice voting". Honestly, I'd
> describe anyone who knew about non-FPP voting systems before 2010 as a
> voting nerd.
>
> On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 2:30 PM Ralph Suter <RLSuter at aol.com> wrote:
>
> 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> <mailto:closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com>
>> 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
>> Message-ID:
>> <CA+euzPirVPAsSfM=BxboPoX_oeUUmZeGYwTRMFpTk3o40ab0Ng at mail.gmail.com> <mailto: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
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20241023/d0fb3ba5/attachment.htm>
More information about the Election-Methods
mailing list