[EM] Jameson Quinn was a pretty cool dude

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi everyone,

It breaks my heart to have to break the news to many of you, but a longtime
participant of the election-methods list was involved in a
terrible accident.  Jameson Quinn died on March 23 while hiking in
Guatemala.  His mother posted about it on Bluesky a couple of days ago
https://bsky.app/profile/voter.bsky.social/post/3llp6vre3gk2s

I've been sitting tight on the information (which I learned from my board
involvement with EVC, where he was also a board member).  But now that I
know the information is public information, I figured it'd be okay to share
it with y'all.

Jameson was a tireless force in the electoral-reform community, and
accomplished a lot.  Like many of us, he liked to tinker around the edges
of election methods, hoping to find big breakthroughs and insights.  He
actually had many big insights, coming up with some very interesting
methods, such as PLACE
https://electowiki.org/wiki/PLACE

...as well as 3-2-1 voting:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/3-2-1_voting

He didn't just come up with new methods.  He also followed through on
advocacy.  He came up with "E Pluribus Hugo" and got the folks who dole out
the Hugo Awards to use it:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/E_Pluribus_Hugo

You'll notice there's a lot of electowiki.org links, rather than
wiki.electorama.com links.  That's because Jameson helped light a fire
under my ass, making sure that the folks in /r/EndFPTP had a wiki for
discussions there.  When they migrated electowiki over to Miraheze, I made
a point of registering electowiki.org, and worked with them to make
electowiki.org a continuation of wiki.electorama.com (rather than a fork).
I could detail more about that, but I want to keep this email about
Jameson.  I don't know exactly what Jameson's role was, but I know he was
critical, and I appreciate it in retrospect.

Jameson and I always had cordial conversations, and I think/hope y'all
didn't get TOO bent out of shape when you had conversations with him.  He
was a genuinely nice guy, and didn't seem to like the rancor that many of
us seem to tolerate.  I'm assuming none of us LIKE the rancor, but there
was a point one time when I was getting a little bent out of shape about
something with a mutual electoral-reform colleague, and he took the time to
have a video chat with me to make sure that things were okay.  He was a
good guy.

And all of this is to say Jameson was a pretty cool dude, and I'll miss him
for sure.  I'm assuming many of you will miss him too, and I suspect the
world is going to learn to miss him as we discover some of his old
writings.  Rest in peace, dude!

Rob
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