[EM] Jameson Quinn was a pretty cool dude

[Rob Lanphier]

Thanks for sharing that, Toby.  Your email inspired me to replace the
too-stubby stub article I had written on electowiki about Jameson Quinn
with a better(-ish) stub.  I would love help from all y'all fleshing out
the article:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Jameson_Quinn

Maybe one day we'll have an article good enough to be copied over to
English Wikipedia.  If anyone has mainstream media articles about Jameson,
please share them here and/or on electowiki.

Rob


On Tue, May 13, 2025 at 3:22 PM Toby Pereira <tdp201b at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> I just saw that there is an online obituary if anyone wants to read it.
> https://obituaries.rwcpulse.com/obituaries/memorials/jameson-quinn?o=8976
>
>
> Toby
>
> On Thursday 3 April 2025 at 12:46:41 BST, Toby Pereira <
> tdp201b at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> This is very sad news to hear and it is a great loss. I had quite a bit of
> communication with Jameson in the past because of our shared interest of
> cardinal proportional methods and I always enjoyed his insightful
> contributions. He is also the only person from the "voting method
> community" that I have ever met in person.
>
> Toby
>
> On Thursday 3 April 2025 at 07:42:57 BST, Rob Lanphier <roblan at gmail.com>
> 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
>
> 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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> info
>
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