Terms for Specific Voting Systems

Jack Waugh

I guess the question of what term is best to choose, from among synonyms, for a given voting system, falls under the category of "Advocacy", because it is a question about what kind of rhetoric works best for addressing a wide audience about voting systems, and the main purpose we have for making our points understood is to advocate for change.

In [link], @rob points out that the term "first past the post" is nonsense. I agree in spades; it is complete nonsense. I have been using it because I got the impression that it is the term known by the highest count of people. Maybe there is something to my trying switching to "single-winner choose-one" or "choose-one plurality".

rob

@jack-waugh Yeah there is no reasonable meaning behind "first past the post". I just use "choose-one" most of the time. Single winner tends to be implicit, at least for me, since I don't spend much time talking about multi-winner. I used to call it "plurality" but regular people don't seem to know what it is. "ranked" and "choose one" seem to get the idea across and directly contrast with each other.

@rob Personally I see the difference as more semantic than anything profound. I do tend to say "choose-one" since it's pretty evocative and FPTP is just kind of weird. I try to avoid "plurality"

because I stumble over the word about 50% of the time and say "purlalitry"
because I like to use the homonym "plurality" with its nicer meaning of multipolarity and diversity within an electorate.

rob

@andy-dienes yeah. "Choose-one" certainly needs the least explanation. It can be contrasted meaningfully with "ranked choice" partly because they both use "choose/choice" in there.

I guess you could have "single choice" vs "ranked choice," but.... well nevermind let's go with choose-one.

robla

@rob - I wouldn't go so far as saying there's "no reasonable meaning". "First-past-the-post" apparently makes sense to people who speak 19th century British English, speak of the weight in terms of "stone", and sprinkle extra instances of the letter "u" in words like "labour" and "colour". I also think FPTP is easier to Google for than "choose-one". I appreciate that /r/EndFPTP seems to be the leading subreddit among those of us that want something better than the most widely-used election method.

That said, I also appreciate the effort that Aaron Hamlin et al have been putting into getting folks to use "choose-one" as less wonky nomenclature than "FPTP". When speaking to people whose first question after hearing about approval voting is: "are you talking about that voting system where you rank the people you like?", it's helpful to be able to respond with "no, the ballot looks the same as a choose-one election, but voters get to mark all of the candidates they approve of. It's 'choose-many' voting instead of 'choose-one'." Using "choose-one" is a good habit to get into when speaking to naive Americans (i.e. most people here).

rob

@robla Hey Robla glad to see you drop by!

I totally understand what FPTP "means" horse-racing-wise (i.e. the one that crosses the finish line first), I just don't get how that applies. Especially if comparing it to, say, Score or Approval, which it seems to apply equally well to. All three simply count up some numbers, and elect whoever has the highest number.

Looking at the early uses you link, it just seems like they are using "first past the post" as a flowery way of saying "winner."

What is "the post" here? It isn't 50%, of course.

In fact, the method I can think of for which the metaphor applies most closely is IRV, as it actually does elect the candidate that surpasses 50% first.

Maybe if I understood what the horse racing analogy was contrasting it with.... Is there another way to judge horse races than which one crosses the finish line first?

Point taken on Googlability and moderately popular subreddits, of course.

Now you are making me want to rename Approval and Score as well. "Choose one," "choose many," "ranked choice" and "rated choice" work together well to differentiate the 4 typical ballot types.

robla

@rob - if I were inventing FPTP/choose-one voting today, I might have picked the latter name, but almost certainly wouldn't have picked the former. Come to think of it, I wouldn't have chosen "choose-one" if I was trying to get people to use it. Basically, what "FPTP" means with respect to choose-one voting is "the horse that gets the ~~best time~~ most votes wins". If I were the inventor of the method, and I wanted people to use it, I'd like the "first-past-the-post" analogy. Horse races are (allegedly) exciting!

As it stands, candidates shouldn't like being compared to horses, and candidates are trying to get a bigger number, not a smaller number. So I hate the analogy. But changing the name of an existing voting system (especially one that a person dislikes) takes a much larger marketing budget than either you or I have. Since the Center for Election Science has a much larger budget, I'm basically following their lead when I call it "choose-one voting".

rob

@robla Yup. I've recently started calling it mostly choose-one here, and at EndFPTP, I kinda go back and forth.

Toby Pereira

Does anyone call it choose-one outside of voting geekery? Surely the idea of electoral reform is to get the public on board, so if a name already exists in the public consciousness for a voting method, you use that name, however illogical and annoying you might find it.

Being from the UK, I've always called it First Past the Post, but since posting on voting forums / mailing lists, I found people calling it plurality, so I used that term as others were using it (and I assumed it was the common US name for it).

But reading this thread, it seems that people are less likely to know the term plurality, so I think I will stick with calling it FPTP. Until you lot have persuaded the general public to call it choose-one, that is.

rob

@toby-pereira said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:

Does anyone call it choose-one outside of voting geekery?

I don't know if the general public has a well-known name for FPTP/plurality/choose-one ... even "first past the post" seems to be restricted to voting geekery. Honestly, I think most of the general public in the US just calls it "voting". Or maybe "regular voting" or "normal voting."

But I know that "choose one" seems to be instantly understood without explanation (especially in contrast with ranked choice, which most people have heard of). I consider it a descriptive term rather than a name per se, similar to "ranked choice".

If I say "first past the post" they have no idea what I am talking about, and it always feels awkward that I then have to say "it just means first to cross the finish line, as in horse racing, but don't bother trying to think about how that metaphor applies, because I haven't figured that out myself, but that is just what people call it."

It always seems a distracting side conversation that is avoided if you just say "choose-one voting, which is the common system where you just pick a single candidate and the one with the most votes wins." Nobody stops to asks for an explanation--- "choose one" does the trick of getting the point across.

robla

@toby-pereira said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:

Being from the UK, I've always called it First Past the Post, but since posting on voting forums / mailing lists, I found people calling it plurality, so I used that term as others were using it (and I assumed it was the common US name for it).

I think your initial instinct was correct. I suspect that the British talk about electoral reform a lot more than Americans do, and "FPTP" seems to be the name that stuck in Great Britain, so it's fine to use it in that context. But the United Kingdom and the United States are two countries separated by a common language, and we Americans ~~don't~~ believe we have a perfect system, because we invented democracy and have a large military to spread our democratic ideals. There seems to be a bit more outward humility in Great Britain.

Anyway, my point is this: most Americans tend to conflate "plurality rule" with "majority rule", and don't really have a name for the thing you call "first-past-the-post voting", because they don't think about it that hard (much in the same way that many languages don't have separate words for "blue" and "green"; presumably the distinction wasn't that important when the respective languages became prominent). The "choose-one" nomenclature works in many contexts speaking to people who don't realize that the English language wasn't invented by Americans.

rob

@robla said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:

most Americans tend to conflate "plurality rule" with "majority rule"

Interestingly the article you quote above uses the term "simple majority" to refer to "plurality." But it is written by a Frenchman who lives in England, and claims that FPTP comes from Australia and/or New Zealand.

You can take all that with a grain of salt though, considering that in French, they use the same word for both black and white. (seriously, look it up!)

last19digitsofpi

@rob said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:

considering that in French, they use the same word for both black and white.

Source? I remember black being noir(e) and white being blanc(he). Of course, it's possible there's some sort of slang term or something similar to our (in)flammable...

While we're on the topic of "terms for specific voting systems"... I think we need a better name for what's been called "Proportional Approval Voting". I feel like it should emphasize that the candidates are elected as a slate. "NP-complete PAV" seems like an attack. Perhaps "group PAV"?

rob

@last19digitsofpi said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:

Source? I remember black being noir(e) and white being blanc(he).

Sorry I was just messing with @robla to see if he'd look it up ... I'll admit I have a hard time grasping the idea of people really not distinguishing between blue and green just because the language doesn't have words for the distinction. So I took it to a bit of an extreme.

(the other stuff is true though)

Jack Waugh

@rob said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:

I think most of the general public in the US just calls it "voting".

I agree. I think it doesn't occur to most US people that more than one way to vote would be possible, and so it doesn't enter their mind to have a term for the way they do it as to be distinguished from possible other ways.

In one of the antisocial media, when I mentioned some alternative system, someone responded that that would be fake voting.

I suspect that many self-described "conservatives" would expect that any proposal to change the voting system comes from "liberals" looking for a way to win elections unfairly at the expense of "conservatives". I put those terms in quotes because I am referring to people using those terms. I do not know what the users of those terms think the "conservatives" want to conserve or what the "liberals" want to liberate. I would use the terms without horror quotes if I stood ready to answer those questions should you ask them of me.

rob

@jack-waugh said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:

I suspect that many self-described "conservatives" would expect that any proposal to change the voting system comes from "liberals" looking for a way to win elections unfairly at the expense of "conservatives".

I think you are right, and therefore is something we should be especially careful about. We shouldn't ever appear to take sides here. Example: when I got frustrated with this community's slow progress (and seemingly conflicting agendas), I posted a bunch of photos of violence on January 6th, showing what happens when people are so polarized that many of them can't accept an outcome they don't like.

But to be clear: I am not blaming this on the right. (well, not here, in this forum) I am blaming it on choose-one voting. If someone looks at those 1/6 photos and sees a bunch of patriots fighting for a noble cause.... fine. They can also be angry at choose-one voting.

So it is a bit of a vicious cycle here. Broken voting causes polarization, polarization prevents us from fixing voting.