Talk:History and use of instant-runoff voting

Why was IRV/STV abandoned in the past?
In historical cases where IRV or STV have been tried then abandoned, why was it abandoned? What problems occurred, who did not like it and why? E.g.: "The Northern Ireland Parliament continued to use the combination until the late 1920s when it switched to the 'first past the post' plurality system" -- why? DBrnstn 14:24, 18 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Shhhhh.... Don't ask! (whisper) politics.... I'd guess. Someone could and should do the research.


 * It is political, largely because the introduction of STV was never popular with the Unionists who controlled the Parliament (under whatever voting system) for its entire history. Contrary to myth it wasn't abolished to restrict the Nationalist voting/Catholic part of the population but instead in response to challenges to the Unionists from other sources such as Independent Unionists and the Labour Party who both won seats off the Unionists in 1925. Timrollpickering (talk) 14:32, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

There is some information on the initiative that rescinded Preferential Voting in Ann Arbor, MI. Basically, the Republicans lost the mayor's office because the Democrats and a progressive party stopped splitting the vote by implementing PV, so they ran an initiative campaign, special election with low attendance, I think, and killed it. Probably similar reasons existed for getting rid of Bucklin voting in various states. Proportional representation was dumped in New York because, horrors, it was electing a few BLACKS and COMMIES! What else would you expect? --Abd (talk) 06:11, 31 December 2007 (UTC)


 * My interpretation as well - plurality holds sway because it usually gives advantage to those who already have the power. And YES - definitely worth getting more history here! (AND FairVote has done more on that regard (for U.S.) than any other source I know.) At least one page here - . Tom Ruen (talk) 06:59, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Why is IRV not Described or Linked to??
It's really quite remarkable: the article manages to get through many sections without actually describing what IRV is! And not a link to any other wikipedia article either. I would not have thought it possible to write an article on "The history of X" without actually saying what X is, and yet, here it is. Chafe66 (talk) 08:29, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

It's linked in the introduction. Tom Ruen (talk) 20:15, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

This article badly needs a write-up of Australia and also more on Papua New Guinea and Fiji
The glaring hole in this article is the 80-year history of IRV in Australia and recent uses in Papua New Guinea and Fiji. —Preceding unsigned comment added by RRichie (talk • contribs) 22:56, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

This remains true as of May 2011. I'll put in a couple links, but some Aussie should jump in...RRichie (talk) 13:04, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Merge with Instant-runoff_voting#Global_use
I vote in favor Instant-runoff_voting should be merged into this article. Most of the info is already here and it will clear redundancy. Grammarxxx (What'd I do this time?) 20:47, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
 * ✅ Klbrain (talk) 20:58, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Table of uses
Hello – there was formerly a table of uses of ‘ranked voting’ in the ranked voting article, but except for IRV it duplicated information in the pages for specific ranked voting methods. It’s best to avoid needless duplication, and the table was unwanted padding in its previous location, so I’ve preserved the IRV entries by copying them to the present article. However I am aware that there is overlap with the running prose. I was hoping that the people who maintain this page would decide whether they wanted discursive or tabular presentation or a mixture of both. Colin.champion (talk) 09:16, 6 August 2021 (UTC)