[EM] Jameson Quinn was a pretty cool dude

[Richard]

I'm literally crying because losing Jameson Quinn is such a great loss. 
All the more so because he was destined to accomplish so much more in 
the field of election-method reform.

I had the joy of co-writing with Jameson the "Declaration of 
Election-Method Reform Advocates."  Here's a copy:

https://www.votefair.org/bansinglemarkballots/declaration.html

Jameson and I simultaneously edited the document on Google Docs.  Doing 
that together in real time was a joy.  During those interactive sessions 
he changed wordings to implement what others had requested, and I 
followed a few sentences behind him and cleaned up the wording to make 
it clearer and cleaner.

A couple of times during this editing we chatted in the sidebar.  He was 
living in Panama and telling me what was happening in the elections, 
especially about all the candidates being corrupt.  IIRK one of the 
candidates was the wife of a jailed former president.  (At that time it 
seemed incredulous; now it seems a similar pattern is going on here, and 
might even be a preview of family inheritance yet to come.)  And I 
taught him some editing tricks, such as making sure the last item in a 
bulleted list was a strong argument, not a weak one.

Only later did I see photos of Jameson.  I hadn't realized he was that 
young.  Apparently that was either before he went to college or before 
he went to grad school.  (I'm old, now 74.)  I knew he had so much more 
to offer.

I'm especially grateful that Jameson negotiated the "Declaration ..." as 
somewhat of a peace treaty among us election-method reformers.  It has 
served to remind us that our enemy is the status quo, not each other's 
"flawed" favorite method.

Thank you Rob for informing us.  And thank you Rob for joining the Equal 
Vote Coalition.  I'm hopeful you can help that group become less 
star-struck.  Not so much because I dislike the star method but because 
the people who promote it are failing to do what Jameson did, which is 
to stick to the underlying facts and not create carefully worded 
misrepresentations.

With fond thoughts of Jameson,

Richard Fobes
The VoteFair guy

Rob, if it seems appropriate, please forward my sympathies to Jameson's 
mother.  May this message remind her that her son's spirit lives on in 
the Declaration of Election-Method Reform Advocates and in the r/EndFPTP 
rule that says "don't bash alternatives."




On 4/2/25 23:42, Rob Lanphier wrote:
> 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 <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 <https://electowiki.org/wiki/PLACE>
> 
> ...as well as 3-2-1 voting:
> https://electowiki.org/wiki/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 <https://electowiki.org/ 
> wiki/E_Pluribus_Hugo>
> 
> You'll notice there's a lot of electowiki.org <http://electowiki.org> 
> links, rather than wiki.electorama.com <http://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 <http://electowiki.org>, and worked with them 
> to make electowiki.org <http://electowiki.org> a continuation of 
> wiki.electorama.com <http://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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