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Notes -
The seemingly now-universal popular habit of calling Instant Runoff Voting (a term that specifies one particular voting system) by the name Ranked Choice Voting (a term that applies to IRV, but also Condorcet methods, STV in multi-winner elections, a ton of other methods, and I guess technically even plurality voting), is weird to me. How did that get started? Long ago when I first looked into better voting systems, it seemed like nobody could make that mistake: people who had also looked into better voting systems wouldn't mix up those terms because they'd get it right, and people who hadn't looked into better voting systems wouldn't mix up those terms because they didn't know the terms.
Are we just at the far end of a branching/viral game of telephone, here, where person A carefully explained about tactical voting and Smith Sets and the DH3 scenario and on and on, but persons Z1 through Z1000 barely managed to get "ranking good" and "plurality bad" out of all that?
My personal beef with IRV is that it claims to make it safe to vote for 3rd parties, but only does so if the 3rd parties have no chance of winning. I'm not sure whether the possibility of "tricking" voters into an untactical split vote would be likely to hurt the Democrats or Republicans more, though; I think Democrats are just more pro-IRV right now because when you feel in control you feel like it's safe to trust wonkish ideas, whereas the minority party has more cause to fear that complications are a way to hide trickery.
I'm a fan of Approval Voting, where the optimal tactics are "look at the two front runners and vote approval for the better of the two as well as anyone you like more than them", not much harder to understand than plurality's "look at the two front runners and vote for the better of the two", and where there's pretty clearly still no trickery hidden in "the person who gets the most votes wins". It's not as good as a Condorcet method in the absence of tactical voting, but since there won't be an absence of tactical voting I think it makes sense to settle on something where the tactical-voting failure states are as benign as possible.
I don't know but I haven't seen any popular discussion of it that didn't call it that. So I'm not about to piss against the wind here...
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It's an intentional propaganda campaign by FairVote, which is the only at all effective organization pushing for alternative voting systems in the United States. They actively fight against any voting system other than Instant Runoff Voting (or Single Transferable Vote for multi-member districts, but the US doesn't really do those) and intentionally use that language to obscure the discussion.
It's a little hard to take FairVote as good-faith actors given they're acting exactly how you'd design an organization to prevent the adoption of any alternative voting systems by pushing the worst choice for an alternative voting system and bad-mouthing all of the others.
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