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Clarifying questions about terminology are on topic, but this thread is about the Maine Supreme Court ruling so advocacy to change voting system's names is off topic here.
@wolftune Individual people going off and creating their own terms is not going to result in a larger movement wide change.
If that's a quest you care about then you'd need to get consensus from CES, CA Approves, Fargo Approves, Utah Approves, SL Approves, etc. -- which is not going to happen, imo.
I also don't think it should happen. Approval voting already has a solid one word self explanatory name that people know, and that's used in both academic and voter level contexts. That's a huge advantage!
Changing that is not worth it for questionable gains at best. I think it would do a lot of damage to try, and I think the failed efforts to market "pick all that you like" voting illustrate that.
@cfrank Yes, but "choose-any" was selected on the basis of being clear (it rolls off the tongue less well than "approval" I'd say), so it really needs to do that job perfectly before we get on to how well it rolls off the tongue.
Edit - I'd say "choose any number" is a little bit less clunky than "choose however many", but neither are great in that respect.
@wolftune There is this thread from 2024. I think it might have passed me by at the time. I see your point about it being clearer about what it does, but on the other hand, it's not something I've really thought about, so I don't think I will suddenly change my language immediately based on this. It's quite a big thing to do, and I think I would need to see that there is a larger consensus in the general voting community that this is the best name, rather than just individuals deciding one at a time.
Edit - Thinking about it, "Choose-any" comes across as ambiguous to me. It could come across as "choose any one".
I think it's fine to have it here, but being a US-specific thing, I probably don't have much to say on it!
I list both names because Clay said he was involved with defining the balance condition.
I don't think so, but Clay was involved with the invention of STAR Voting. Maybe that's what you were thinking of or what he meant? I could be wrong. In any case we generally are trying to move away from naming things after people which is why this was named the Equality Criterion and then codified as such in the halls of peer review. Something we all worked very hard to do.
Clay and Mark both deserve quite a lot of credit for their many contributions, but let's help these terms and criteria catch on by being consistent with using their formal names.
On the technical properties there are no issues here.
On the practical considerations there are a number.
I recommend having one voting method only. If you want to have a primary and general then use the same good method for both and don't narrow it down too much before the general. That's actually simpler and will get much broader support from stakeholder factions and minor parties who want real choices on the general election ballot.
Condorcet is accurate enough to just skip the primary all together unless there are too many candidates. If you want Condorcet with a simple tiebreaker why not just make the tiebreaker between the finalists (tied candidates) automatic in the event that it's even needed? In the tiebreaker, each voters ballot counts as a vote for their favorite(s) still in the running. If a voter ranked two candidates equally that would count as a vote for both. The finalist with the most votes wins.
The tiebreaker never even has to be explained. It's literally just a built in tiebreaker like a Plurality provision might call for a drawing of lots or a coin toss, but the ballots already have the tiebreaker info they need so it can be done instantly.
@toby-pereira Anything can be argued and counter-argued in court, but my assessment above is based on what a fair and likely ruling would be, in my professional opinion.
I'm not a lawyer, but have been studying these things for years and we did win the case in the Oregon Supreme Court against the Oregon Legislative Council which found that RCV's ballot title in Oregon was misleading and inaccurate as it pertains to RCV's majority winner claims, though there is apparently no mechanism anymore to enforce such a ruling.
Two confounding data points:
@psephomancy Even if we wanted to, redefining the term "Ranked Choice Voting" isn't within our power. They have clear and defensible trademark over the term, which again, was coined specifically for IRV, not to mention name recognition for RCV by millions of people that they've invested millions of dollars to build.
Terminology in voting science is already so jumbled. Conflating good ranked methods (Condorcet) with Ranked Choice Voting (IRV & STV) or Instant Runoff Voting (IRV only) is only going to hurt the better options in the scenarios where RCV is a dirty word, while in contexts where RCV is well regarded, conflating better ranked methods serves no benefit because RCV dwarfs all the other alternatives in terms of name recognition and market dominance.
Our only way forward here is to out RCV as the outdated and oversold method that it is, position better alternatives as the successor, and move forward from there. Strategically.
Etjon Basha asks, "So, not even approval would pass? Nothing beyond plurality?".
In this context, "plurality" doesn't mean "Choose One Only" Voting or FPTP. Plurality means a class of systems where the candidate with the most votes wins, as opposed to "majority" voting systems in which the candidate with the majority of votes cast wins.
Approval is a plurality method.
