Birth of the RCV reform movement (and its terminology)

In the room where it happened: here’s where the terms "instant runoff voting" and "ranked choice voting" come from (and why they are the exact same method)

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I was asked recently by a reporter: “Where do the terms ranked choice voting (RCV) and instant runoff voting (IRV) come from?” I understand her confusion. There is such an alphabet soup of terms and abbreviations out there. Her next question was prescient: “Is IRV the same thing as RCV? Or are there different versions of instant runoff voting and ranked choice voting?”

This is not just a matter of academic interest. Advocates for other electoral systems are starting to co-opt the names “instant runoff voting” and “ranked choice voting” for their own purposes, piggybacking on their popularity to call their own methods by the same names. This is causing much confusion.

For example, last summer in Redondo Beach, when the city council was implementing RCV for its first election this March 2025, advocates for an obscure method known as STAR Voting, which is not used anywhere on Planet Earth, tried to claim that their method is also “instant runoff voting” (the term used in the Redondo charter amendment), and therefore would legally fulfill the mandates of the ballot measure that was passed by Redondo voters with 77% of the vote. That provided an opening for an obstructionist mayor and city councilmember, both opposed to reform, to take advantage of the confusion and try and convince their council colleagues to stop the implementation of the real instant runoff voting. Ultimately the council did the right thing and voted to implement, but it caused months of reform mayhem.

Political reformer Charles T. Munger Jr., who donated $12 million to the statewide ballot proposition in California for redistricting reform, has invented his own variety of another method known as Condorcet voting. Proponents of his method have tried to call it “ranked-choice ballots” or “ranked pairs.” Similarly Ohio State University law professor Edward Foley has called his recently invented, never-been-used method a total vote runoff “version of Ranked Choice Voting” that is “designed to be identical to Instant Runoff Voting, which is the most commonly understood and implemented form of Ranked Choice Voting.” Foley apparently believes there are multiple “forms” of RCV, when in fact there are not, since IRV and RCV are the exact same thing (as I will demonstrate below).

This kind of nomenclature piggybacking is greatly adding to the confusion, which in turn makes it harder to pass electoral reform because when voters are confused over a ballot measure, they vote “NO.”

So in this article I am going to clarify some of this confusion, including where the names “ranked choice voting” and “instant runoff voting” come from, and whether IRV and RCV are the same method (spoiler alert: they are).

How do I know this, and how can I state this so categorically? Simple. Because myself and other colleagues like Rob Richie were “in the room where it happened,” so to speak, in terms of inventing and adopting this electoral system jargon and nomenclature. Both the names “instant runoff voting” and “ranked choice voting” were launched in the 1990s and promoted in the ensuing years by us and other leaders from the Center for Voting and Democracy (which since 2004 has been known as FairVote), an organization that Rob and I cofounded in 1992.

There are other methods that use ranked ballots, but there is only one ranked choice voting. And it is the exact same method that originally was called instant runoff voting, and also historically has been known by other names such as “alternative vote” and “majority preferential voting.” All of those names describe a single, well-defined method for electing political representatives that has been in use for 100 years in Australia and Ireland and for over 20 years in the United States. That method has a very precise procedure attached to it, which is this:

“Voters rank their favorite candidates in order of preference. Votes are counted in rounds, with the candidate with the fewest first rankings eliminated in the first round, and those voters’ ballots instantly moved to their next-ranked candidate. In each round of counting, each voter’s ballot counts as one vote for her/his highest-ranked remaining candidate until only two candidates remain, in which case the candidate with the most votes – a majority of that final round’s remaining ballots – is declared the majority winner in a single election.”

Here, told for the first time publicly, is the story of how the names “ranked choice voting” and “instant runoff voting” came into being, including a detailed timeline of documentation.

The origin story of the names IRV and RCV

In 1995, Rob Richie, the executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy (CVD) was speaking at an event and promoting CVD’s signature reforms -- proportional representation and the electoral method that was then-known to political scientists as “majority preferential voting” (“Preferential voting” was the term used not only by many political scientists but also by Australia to refer to Down Under’s single-winner method of election. The United Kingdom had used the “alternative vote” to describe the system, but preferential voting was also the term used in parliamentary guides recommending it like Robert’s Rules of Order. And dozens of private organizations in the US and other countries had been using this method for internal elections for many years). Following his presentation, Rob was approached by an audience member who cleverly suggested that the term “instant runoff voting” was a better name for branding and promoting public understanding of this single-winner reform that we were calling “majority preferential voting.”

Rob, myself and a small circle of CVD colleagues and supporters discussed the pros and cons of this name change. Certainly in the five years that we had been educating Americans about these voting methods, the very academic-sounding terms “majority preferential voting” and “preferential voting” had not exactly grabbed the attention of American audiences. We recognized that “instant runoff voting” might better capture something essential in the US context, because numerous cities and also several states already used traditional runoff elections – a second election among the top two finishers – to pick majority winners. So an “instant runoff” could be used to compare favorably to what we started calling the “delayed runoffs” of a second election.

No other previous electoral method that we were aware of had been known as “instant runoff voting,” and CVD’s adoption of this term appeared to be its first widespread use in the US or in any country. The one known exception that we found was in a New York Times news story about Ann Arbor, Michigan’s use of preferential voting in 1975 to elect its mayor. In that Times article, one unknown official referred to the preferential voting system as an “instant runoff” but the name never caught on and Ann Arbor repealed its preferential voting system after one election (in which the Democratic Party candidate for mayor, an African-American, came from behind to barely defeat the GOP candidate by about 100 votes after picking up a sizable number of second rankings from supporters of the left-progressive Human Rights Party candidate. As the Democrat was the first Black mayor in Ann Arbor history, and had elected by a new method, that led to a lawsuit, much controversy, a political backlash and finally repeal).

Feeling innovatively emboldened, CVD officially adopted “instant runoff voting” as the term that we would use for the Australian preferential voting system and the UK alternative vote system for single winner, majoritarian elections. For the rest of 1995 and the years going forward, CVD promoted the IRV name via op-eds, reports, media interviews and other promotional means.

For example, CVD used “instant runoff voting” in a policy report published in November 1995, “End of Majority Rule,” the release of which was covered by C-SPAN. In 1996 and 1997, opeds were published by Rob Richie and myself calling for IRV, including “A Cheaper, Better Way than Run-Offs,” “Majority Rule: As Easy as 1-2-3,” and “To the Spoiler Goes the Victory?”

IRV became the dominant “term of art” used in the US for this specific reform, including its use in a charter amendment enabling local implementation in Santa Clara County, California in 1998, and in New Mexico legislation to implement it for congressional elections that passed the state senate in 1999 (but died in the state house). In 1999 and 2000, a number of opeds about instant runoff voting by Rob, myself and others were published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, Vancouver Columbian, Syracuse Herald, the Charlotte News and Observer, Roll Call, The Nation, TomPaine.com, New York Times, Washington Post, Detroit Free Press, Colorado Daily, Raleigh News and Observer, Houston Chronicle and other publications.

In November 2000, two Bay Area cities in California passed ballot measures advancing IRV. San Leandro established IRV in its city charter as a statutory option allowing the city council to enact it without another vote of the voters (and which the city council finally enacted in 2010 for first usage). Oakland’s charter amendment authorized the use of IRV for filling vacancies, calling it “preference voting.”

In 2001, federal legislation was introduced by Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. and was titled the “Voting Equipment Compatibility With Instant Runoff Voting Act of 2001.'' In 2002, in an unsuccessful ballot measure campaign in Alaska to pass instant runoff voting, Senator John McCain recorded a robocall in support in which he uses the term “instant runoff.” (you can listen to Senator McCain’s 47 second promotion of IRV at this link).

Enter a new name for IRV – Ranked Choice Voting

In 1999 in San Francisco, in the heat of a mayoral election, the progressive president of the SF Board of Supervisors, Tom Ammiano, made it into the two-round runoff in December via a write-in candidacy. To counter criticisms from his opponent, the rascally incumbent mayor Willie Brown, that he had no chance to win and was therefore wasting taxpayers’ money on an unnecessary second election, President Ammiano introduced a charter amendment to establish IRV, saying that majority winners would be decided in a single November “instant runoff” election and therefore would not waste taxpayer dollars.

But a curious thing happened in the drafting of that IRV charter amendment. We at CVD, including my colleague Caleb Kleppner, wrote the first draft, but the city attorney’s office inexplicably inserted into the statutory language some new terminology, calling for the election of city offices “using a ranked-choice, or ‘instant run-off,’ ballot.” Throughout our draft, wherever we had used “instant runoff,” the city attorney also inserted “ranked-choice.” As Caleb and I already were fighting the city attorney on other issues, it didn't seem wise to challenge the use of "ranked-choice" in the charter. Besides, we did not really expect this charter amendment to actually make it to the ballot (it did not). But it set a precedent that would play out a couple of years later.

IRV – nope, RCV – wins big in San Francisco

Following San Francisco’s brief flirtation in 1999 with an IRV charter amendment, in 2001 this effort gained more steam. A new ballot measure was introduced by a pro-IRV member of the Board of Supervisors that mandated San Francisco to use IRV for most local elected offices, including mayor. Once again, in the drafting of the charter amendment, the city attorney’s office took liberties with the terminology, specifically adopting dual phrasing to call this electoral method both “instant runoff” and “ranked choice voting.”

The charter amendment on the ballot in March 2002 labeled the subsection of the charter as “SEC. 13.102. INSTANT RUNOFF ELECTIONS.” But within the charter amendment itself, this method was continually framed in the following ways: “shall be elected using a ranked-choice, or "instant runoff" ballot” and “Ranked choice, or "instant runoff" balloting shall be used for the general municipal election.” This dual framing as “ranked choice” and “instant runoff” was used 11 times in the San Francisco charter.

San Francisco voters decisively approved the IRV/RCV ballot measure, which was the first victory in several decades for electoral system reform in the United States that actually mandated an implementation (the previous victories in Santa Clara County, San Leandro and Oakland did not actually implement IRV, instead they removed certain legal hurdles to a possible eventual implementation). We at the Center for Voting and Democracy were ecstatic and looked forward to our first victory and implementation in the ten years since our founding in 1992.

But then another curious thing happened. San Francisco’s director of elections was not thrilled to have to change his administrative regimen to this new and unfamiliar (to him) method. The director and San Francisco’s voting equipment vendor ES&S, pressured by Mayor Willie Brown and other anti-reform forces, dragged their feet and failed to implement IRV in time for the 2003 mayoral election (Brown’s handpicked mayoral candidate, Supervisor and now California governor Gavin Newsom, feared that IRV would favor his presumed chief mayoral opponent, the aforementioned Tom Ammiano, in building coalitions to win). CVD and local plaintiffs sued San Francisco to force compliance with the charter and implementation. So IRV in San Francisco had a difficult birth amidst controversy and contentious headlines.

Once the mayoral election was over, backroom political interference disappeared and finally San Francisco was ready for a November 2004 first implementation. Except for one surprising detail – the director of elections, always a cautious administrator, unilaterally decided to change the name of our reform from “instant runoff voting” to “ranked choice voting” in all educational and outreach efforts, including to the media, and on the ballot itself! His rationale was that he wanted to downplay expectations that the public would see “instant” results on election night, since the director was not planning to run the first IRV tally for several days. We at CVD were not pleased that the DOE had done this, but there was little we could do since we didn’t want to mire IRV’s first use in more controversy.

Also, for the first election in which we needed to educate voters that they now had the option of ranking their ballots, the name “ranked choice voting” turned out to be descriptively useful in helping voters to grasp how they should use the ranked ballots, as well as the allure of ranking your favorite multiple candidates.

The slow transition from “instant runoff voting” to “ranked choice voting”

This dual framing of instant runoff voting/ranked choice voting continued to be used in the years ahead, not only in San Francisco but all across the country. Two years later in 2006, the Oakland charter amendment (link here) that voters overwhelmingly approved to elect local offices used the dual framing: “shall be conducted using ranked choice voting, known sometimes as ‘instant runoff voting.’” Also in 2006, Minneapolis passed a ballot measure for instant runoff voting to elect its mayor, city council and other offices, but by the time of its first implementation in 2009, Minneapolis had changed the name for this method to “ranked choice voting.”

In 2005, voters approved ballot measures to establish “instant runoff voting” in Burlington (VT) for mayoral elections and Berkeley (CA), Pierce County (WA) and Takoma Park (MD), though these amendments did not use ranked-choice voting. In 2007, Vermont legislation to establish “instant runoff voting” for U.S. House and U.S. Senate elections earned the support of Sen. Bernie Sanders and in 2008 reached the desk of the governor, who vetoed it. In 2008, 65% of voters in Santa Fe, NM approved a charter amendment with language to establish “ranked choice (sometimes called instant runoff) voting.”

The terms used in charter amendments, as well as in media coverage, began to shift over time. In a New York Times article from 2004 reporting on first usage in San Francisco, both the terms instant runoff voting and ranked choice voting were used but IRV was the more featured name. By 2011, NPR affiliate KQED in San Francisco featured an article, “Ranked Choice Voting Explained,” that still used both names, but now ranked choice voting was the more featured name.

In 2011, the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld the legality of RCV and ruled against a plaintiff trying to stop its use in San Francisco, Dudum vs Arntz. The court used the same dual framing, saying: “instant runoff or ‘ranked-choice’ or ‘alternative vote’ systems have been used in the United States and elsewhere at various times.”

In 2012, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen issued statewide guidelines titled “Instant Runoff Voting in Charter Counties and Charter Cities” (link here) using the same dual framing. The first paragraph of this document reads: “’Instant Runoff Voting,’ also known as ‘Ranked Voting,’ is an election method in which a single election determines the candidate supported by the voters, eliminating the need for separate run-off elections… ballots are counted in rounds that simulate a series of runoffs until either a single candidate among several attains a majority of votes or only two candidates remain and the one with the greatest number of votes is declared winner.”

As of December 2014, FairVote’s website introducing this reform was headlined “Ranked Choice Voting / Instant Runoff Voting.” But from 2015 through 2020, the term ranked choice voting became the more widely used term. What really cemented its preeminence was Maine’s passage of a ballot measure that established the use of “ranked choice voting” in 2016. From that point forward, the use of RCV as the dominant term of art really took off and surpassed IRV.

Also, RCV became more popular with activists because it was useful as a catch-all umbrella term for both single-winner and multi-seat elections (the latter being proportional representation, PR). IRV was still sometimes used in certain local situations for the single-winner, majoritarian version in which a “delayed” two-round runoff was being replaced. IRV’s use of ranked ballots was viewed as a useful transition step towards the ranked ballot version of PR, i.e. single transferable vote, STV. Also, RCV was favored because it usefully communicated to voters that they should rank multiple candidates on their ballots.

History cannot be unlived

The celebrated American poet Maya Angelou wrote in her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” that “history cannot be unlived.” The history of ranked choice voting/instant runoff voting also cannot be unlived, despite the attempts by some enthusiastic proponents of other electoral methods to do so. A few of us from CVD/FairVote were there at the beginning, in the room where it happened. We know where those names came from because we were the ones who either invented them or adopted and then promoted them.

As outlined in some detail above, there is a long and documented history of the derivation of the terms “instant runoff voting” and “ranked choice voting.” That history makes it crystal clear that, from a historical, legal and operational standpoint, there is no daylight between the terms “instant runoff voting” and “ranked choice voting.” They are exactly the same method and have long been used interchangeably, depending on the situation. And they are exactly the same as Australia’s preferential voting system used to elect its House (with the multi-seat version, STV, used to elect its Senate), and the same as what Ireland uses to elected its president (with multi-seat STV used to elect its parliament, Dáil Éireann).

As RCV/IRV has grown in popularity, it was perhaps inevitable that proponents of other methods would try to piggyback on that popularity by trying to coopt the names. My advice to those advocates is: it's a big country, and there is lots of room for competing electoral reformers promoting different methods. Despite some disagreements among this broad world of reformers, we should try to approach our work and our relations as fellow reformers as respectfully as possible. Trying to coopt and in some cases outright steal the names used by other reformers in their work is dishonest and unethical, despite your good reform intentions. And it creates confusion over names and definitions that actually undermines your own reform work, as well as those of others.

In other words, find your own names and terminology. Ranked choice voting and instant runoff voting are already taken.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776.bsky.social @StevenHill1776