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<p>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
(<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/03/ranked-choice-instant-runoff-ballot-initiatives-dc/">https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/03/ranked-choice-instant-runoff-ballot-initiatives-dc/</a>),
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 (<span data-date=""><a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/democracy/2024/10/18/ranked-choice-voting-democracy-reform-alexandra-copper-trevor-potter-campaign-legal-center">https://chicago.suntimes.com/democracy/2024/10/18/ranked-choice-voting-democracy-reform-alexandra-copper-trevor-potter-campaign-legal-center</a>),
</span>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
(<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://effectivegov.uchicago.edu/primers/ranked-choice-voting">https://effectivegov.uchicago.edu/primers/ranked-choice-voting</a>)
that explains that "<span>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.<br>
</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>By the way, the John Anderson article I mentioned was
published in NYT July 24, 1992 (</span><a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/24/opinion/break-the-political-stranglehold.html">https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/24/opinion/break-the-political-stranglehold.html</a>),
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.<br>
</p>
<p><span>-Ralph Suter<br>
</span></p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 10/23/2024 11:39 AM, Closed Limelike
Curves wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CA+euzPir45JFLbRKLu1=icLt_AnzdTOjeQxHHTTxpZS56xhf9g@mail.gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<div>
<div dir="auto">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.</div>
</div>
<div>
<div><br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at
2:30 PM Ralph Suter <<a href="mailto:RLSuter@aol.com"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">RLSuter@aol.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204)">
<div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>-Ralph Suter<br>
</p>
<div>On 10/18/2024 3:02 PM, <a
href="mailto:election-methods-request@lists.electorama.com"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">election-methods-request@lists.electorama.com</a>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre style="font-family:monospace"><pre
style="font-family:monospace">Message: 9
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2024 10:05:55 -0700
From: Closed Limelike Curves <a
href="mailto:closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com"
style="font-family:monospace" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true"><closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com></a>
To: Kristofer Munsterhjelm <a href="mailto:km-elmet@munsterhjelm.no"
style="font-family:monospace" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true"><km-elmet@munsterhjelm.no></a>
Cc: Chris Benham <a href="mailto:cbenhamau@yahoo.com.au"
style="font-family:monospace" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true"><cbenhamau@yahoo.com.au></a>,
<a href="mailto:election-methods@lists.electorama.com"
style="font-family:monospace" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">"election-methods@lists.electorama.com"</a>
<a href="mailto:election-methods@lists.electorama.com"
style="font-family:monospace" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true"><election-methods@lists.electorama.com></a>, Rob Lanphier
<a href="mailto:roblan@gmail.com" style="font-family:monospace"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"><roblan@gmail.com></a>
Subject: Re: [EM] "Instant-runoff voting" article renamed to
"Ranked-choice voting" on English Wikipedia
Message-ID:
<a
href="mailto:CA+euzPirVPAsSfM=BxboPoX_oeUUmZeGYwTRMFpTk3o40ab0Ng@mail.gmail.com"
style="font-family:monospace" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true"><CA+euzPirVPAsSfM=BxboPoX_oeUUmZeGYwTRMFpTk3o40ab0Ng@mail.gmail.com></a>
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 <
<a href="mailto:km-elmet@munsterhjelm.no" style="font-family:monospace"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">km-elmet@munsterhjelm.no</a>> wrote:
</pre><blockquote type="cite"
style="font-family:monospace;color:rgb(0,124,255)"><pre
style="font-family:monospace">On 2024-10-18 17:38, Chris Benham wrote:
</pre><blockquote type="cite"
style="font-family:monospace;color:rgb(0,124,255)"><pre
style="font-family:monospace">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.
</pre></blockquote><pre style="font-family:monospace"> 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
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info</pre></blockquote></pre>
</blockquote>
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