On Sun, Jul 27, 2025, at 8:09 AM, Tim Düsterhus wrote: > Hi > > On 7/24/25 15:42, Larry Garfield wrote: >> Just to clarify here, Single Transferable Vote and Ranked Choice Voting are >> the same thing. I think it's just another Ameircan-vs-British English >> question. :-) > > My understanding is that “Ranked Choice Voting” is a generic term of > which “Single Transferable Vote” is a specific implementation. I > specifically do not want to allow any other implementations than the one > the PHP project is already comfortable with using.
<Tangent> Disclosure: I am a founding member of the Board of Directors for Fair Vote Illinois, the Ranked Choice Voting organization in my US state. I also led the ground campaign for my town to become the first in the state to vote to adopt RCV. So I have more than a passing involvement in these details. :-) The terminology in this area is sadly rather muddled, as there are no formal terms. There are several closely related voting systems that involve voters listing choices in exclusive order. Collectively they are known as "Ranked Voting." There are then several different ways to count and collate the votes, though they all look identical to the voter. Condorcet voting is where the winner is whoever would win in a one-v-one match up with every other candidate. This can be easily determined through a ranked ballot, though not all elections have a Concorcet winner. Instant-runoff voting is what most people think of, where you eliminate low-ranked choices and count voters' next choices, until there is a majority winner. In the US, for reasons I don't understand, it's become commonplace to use the term "Ranked Choice Voting" for this method, and is the most common form of Ranked Voting in use today. It also goes by the name Preferential voting or Alternative vote in different areas, just to keep life confusing. Single Transferable Vote, according to Wikipedia, is for electing multiple people in the same election. It involves counting fractional votes in case someone gets more votes than needed. It also goes by the name "Proportional Ranked Choice Voting." This is what FIG has long used for electing its leadership. Technically STV's degenerate case where there's only one choice being elected is equivalent to IRV/RCV. There's also others like Bourda count, which are not relevant to us for now. cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting </Tangent> All that said, I am not suggesting we put "RCV" into the bylaw text. It's fine to just list STV as that's the term we already use. >> How about this, as a following paragraph: >> >> As an STV example, a secondary vote using STV and having 5 "Foo", 4 "Bar", 8 >> "Baz", and 9 "Abstain" first-choice votes has no majority, so will go to a >> second round. "Bar" will be eliminated and those votes redistributed to >> second-choice options. If for example the second round result is 6 "Foo", 9 >> "Baz", and 11 "Abstain", then Baz will have won as it has a clear majority >> of non-Abstain votes cast. > > That is quite verbose and requires two assumptions to be made, making it > hard to follow when not already knowing how STV works. I think it will > confuse more than it helps. > > Best regards > Tim Düsterhus It's 3 sentences, and less than 4 lines wrapped. I'd hardly call that verbose. --Larry Garfield
