Talk:Proportional Representation using the Single Transferable Vote

Re a change at Instant Runoff Voting, Jtdirl wrote:

rv. stop trying to claim that instant-runoff voting is what is used in single seat PR. It is still called PR.STV

Cool, my first edit war! Since the issue is the definition of "PR.STV" rather than "IRV" I figure this is the best place to discuss it.

I have never seen PR.STV used to refer to single winner STV, but more importantly "single seat PR" doesn't make any sense. By definition there is nothing proportional about a single winner election.

I agree that the many names for STV and its relatives are a confusing mess. Wikipedia is possibly the first forum detailed and international enough to have had to deal with it in full. Terms I've seen used are:

seats > 0        STV  Hare Preferential
seats = 1        STV  IRV   Preferential 
seats > 1        STV  PR.STV  Quota Preferential  Hare  Hare-Clark

So the 'best' meanings of STV, Hare and Preferential can be debated, but IRV and PR.STV are unambiguous.

-- Pm67nz 03:31, 29 Nov 2003 (UTC)