Alternative Voting - Terminology

Terminology

Instant runoff voting has a number of other names, often tied to countries where it is used. Australia uses the system for most single candidate elections and calls it "Preferential Voting". The British usually refer to IRV as the "alternative vote" although it is not widely used (as of 2012).

In the United States, many observers call it instant runoff voting because it resembles Two-round system runoff voting except that voters may not change their preference between rounds.

Although it is only one of several relying on ranking candidates, IRV is referred to as "ranked choice voting" in some American cities and the "preferential ballot" or "preferential voting" in Canada and Australia. It occasionally is referred to as Ware's method after its inventor, American William Robert Ware. North Carolina law uses "instant runoff" to describe the contingent vote or "batch elimination" form of IRV in one-seat elections. A single second round of counting produces the top two candidates for a runoff election. Election officials in Hendersonville, North Carolina use "instant runoff" to describe a multi-seat election system that attempts to simulate in a single round of voting their previous system of multi-seat runoffs. State law in South Carolina and Arkansas use "instant runoff" to describe the practice of having certain categories of absentee voters cast ranked ballots before the first round of a runoff that are then counted in a runoff election.

When the single transferable vote (STV) system is applied to a single-winner election it becomes IRV. For this reason IRV is sometimes considered to be merely a limited form of STV. However, IRV is usually excluded from discussions of STV, because STV was designed for multi-seat constituencies, redistributes votes from both the top (winners) and bottom (dropped candidates), and produces broadly proportional results (depending on the number of seats per constituency); none of which need apply to IRV. Even so, some Irish observers mistakenly call IRV "proportional representation" based on the fact that the same ballot form is used to elect its president by IRV and parliamentary seats by STV.