So a group from the Equal Vote Coalition has just had a paper published (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10602-022-09389-3) regarding STAR voting, VSE, and what they call the Equality Criterion. This is the first time I've been able to see a full copy of the paper, and thus it's the first time I have able to confirm that a.) some of my work was used, and b.) I was not given any credit for this.
I had been approached previously about the possibility of using one of my criteria definitions as the formal definition of the Equality Criterion in this paper. However, this occurred roughly a day before the paper had to be submitted to the journal. This was unfortunate because I was under a lot of stress and really didn't have enough time or mental bandwidth to address the questions about my work that came up. I tried to give a decent answer, but after a little back and forth I stopped getting responses.
At the time the issue of how to credit me did come up, since I generally post under BTernaryTau rather than my full name. Because I wasn't sure how to handle this and didn't even know if my work would be included, I said that I'd prefer to determine whether and how my work would be used first, then specify how I would be credited. However, because the conversation about the relevance of my work was never concluded, this topic was never returned to.
Eventually a preprint of the paper (https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-2050377/v1) was made available publicly, which I did check out. This preprint mentioned the Equality Criterion but did not include a definition. I was not included in the citations or the acknowledgements, so I assumed they decided to go with a different means of formalizing it. However, it is clear that the full paper does in fact draw upon my definitions for the cancellation criterion (https://bternarytau.github.io/miscellaneous/voting-theory/cancellation-criterion) and opposite cancellation criterion (https://bternarytau.github.io/miscellaneous/voting-theory/opposite-cancellation-criterion) in order to create its definition of the Equality Criterion, and yet this version also fails to credit me in any way.
On the one hand, I don't want to make a big deal out of this since I really like what the Equal Vote Coalition does, and since the paper ultimately used a fairly small portion of my work. On the other hand, a lot of my efforts with regard to voting methods are intentionally "hit-or-miss" with respect to whether they turn out to be relevant more broadly, so when part of my work does turn out to be relevant, I end up caring a great deal. This is especially true when my work is relevant to an organization that I have donated to and publicly advocated for. I also want to avoid setting an implicit precedent that it's ok to use my work without crediting me. I don't have a good solution for balancing these concerns, so I've settled on making this post. If nothing else, I hope making this public knowledge can prevent any future incidents of this kind.