[EM] Jameson Quinn was a pretty cool dude

[Hahn, Paul]

I attended the WorldCons at which E Pluribus Hugo was proposed, accepted, and first used.  On first reading the description I was like, "Hey, I know that guy from Election-Methods!"  I have no doubt it was successful in its intended purpose of blunting the influence of certain people who were acting in bad faith at that time.

Very sorry to hear of his death.  A great loss.

--pH

From: Election-Methods <election-methods-bounces at lists.electorama.com> On Behalf Of Rob Lanphier
Sent: Thursday, April 3, 2025 1:42 AM
To: election-methods at lists.electorama.com
Subject: [EM] Jameson Quinn was a pretty cool dude

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<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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