RCV-IRV — origins and spread¶

Where instant-runoff voting came from, and why it looks the way it does. Short version: counting the whole ballot came first; IRV was the hand-countable workaround.**

→ Method page: RCV-IRV (Hare) · the naming tangle: RCV vs. IRV vs. RCV-IRV

Whole-ballot counting came first¶

There are several ways to tally a ranked ballot, and the first idea was the thorough one: read the entire ranking and elect the candidate preferred over every other head-to-head — what we now call the Condorcet winner. The Marquis de Condorcet formalized this in 1785 (Jean-Charles de Borda had proposed his own rank-points method a few years earlier; the idea traces back to Ramon Llull centuries before that).

These methods use all the rankings, so they tend to elect a broadly-preferred candidate — but tallying every pairwise matchup by hand is laborious. That tallying cost is exactly the problem the next idea set out to solve. (The modern, practical version of "count the whole ballot" is Ranked Robin.)

IRV: a hand-countable workaround (~150 years ago)¶

Instant-runoff voting — eliminate the candidate with the fewest first choices, transfer those ballots, repeat — was designed as a procedure you could run by hand. The single-winner rule is usually credited to William Robert Ware at MIT around 1871; Thomas Hare (1857) had already designed the multi-winner transferable vote (STV) it descends from. So the elimination shape is roughly 150 years old.

The trade it makes: rounds of simple first-choice counts are easy to hand-tally, but eliminating on first choices alone can cut a broadly-liked middle candidate who would beat every rival one-on-one — so IRV is not Condorcet-efficient. That's the center squeeze. In other words, IRV bought hand-countability at the cost of some representativeness that whole-ballot counting had.

A century of use in Australia¶

Australia adopted the Alternative Vote — its name for single-winner IRV — for House of Representatives elections in 1918, and has used it ever since: over 100 years of real-world experience (the Senate uses STV, the multi-winner cousin). What that century actually proves — workable and durable, yes; broke two-party dominance, no — is assessed even-handedly in The Alternative Vote in Australia.

US momentum — the last ~20 years¶

Local: San Francisco (2004), Minneapolis, and New York City (2021 primaries), plus dozens of other cities.
Statewide: Maine (the first state, 2018 — whose ranked rounds run as a courier-to-Augusta central tabulation operation) and Alaska (2022, paired with a top-four primary — whose first race became a textbook IRV failure).
Adopted then repealed: North Carolina piloted IRV (2007–2013), including the first statewide general election ever decided by IRV (a 2010 Court of Appeals seat), before repealing the program — see RCV-IRV in North Carolina.

Adoption has continued to expand city by city; check FairVote's "where it's used" for the current list.

Synonyms¶

"Instant Runoff Voting," "Alternative Vote" (UK / Australia), and "Preferential Voting" (Australia) all name the same single-winner method that US usage calls "RCV." Why those names mislead — and why "preferential" is itself a misnomer — is in the naming problem.

Sources: Instant-runoff voting — Wikipedia, Condorcet method — Wikipedia, Where RCV is used — FairVote