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"Preference" — the Word That Causes Half the Confusion

"Preferential Voting" (Australia's name for RCV-IRV) is a misnomer. Here's why, and what "preference" actually means.

The trouble is that "preference" has two different meanings, and voting debates slide between them constantly:

  1. Everyday meaning — your subjective opinion. "I prefer A" = "I like A." This is rich and includes how much you like each option, your indifferences, your hesitations.
  2. Technical (social-choice) meaning — a ranking. In the academic literature a "preference" is a complete, transitive ordering of the candidates — i.e., literally a ranking. Following Arrow, "preference" and "ranking" are often used interchangeably. (The social-choice scholar Eric Pacuit notes he deliberately says "ranking" rather than "preference" to avoid exactly this confusion.)

The key insight: a ballot only captures some aspect of your preference, and you shouldn't identify the two. Your subjective opinion is the full thing; a ranked ballot records only the order, a scored ballot records order + strength, a choose-one ballot records only your favorite. None of them is your preference — each is a lossy snapshot of it.

The four ways a ballot can ask for your "preference"

  • Choose one candidate (plurality).
  • Choose several (approval — a limited number, or as many as you like).
  • Rank them (1st, 2nd, 3rd…).
  • Rate / score them (A is 5, B is 2…).

All four express a "preference" in the everyday sense. So naming one of them "Preferential Voting" claims a general word for a single specific method.

Why "Preferential Voting" is a misnomer

Australia calls RCV-IRV "Preferential Voting" — and it's misleading on two levels:

  • It implies it's the way to express preferences. But every method above expresses preferences. Approval, Score, and STAR voters are expressing preferences too. The name quietly suggests the others don't.
  • "Preference" is broader than "ranking." In the everyday sense, a preference includes strength ("I love A, tolerate B"), which a score captures but a rank throws away. So "Preferential Voting" attaches the broad concept (which covers scoring) to the narrow mechanism (strict ranking) — the exact opposite of clarifying. (See scores_vs_ranks.md.)

The same word trips people elsewhere too: a "preference ballot" is ambiguous (ranks? scores?), and "preferences" can even mislead about intent — a judge or a voter may be expressing what they believe is right, not merely what they personally fancy.

The honest takeaway

"Preferential Voting," like "Ranked Choice Voting," is a broad-sounding label glued to one specific method (RCV-IRV / Hare). When precision matters, name the ballot (ranked vs. scored) and the count (IRV elimination vs. Condorcet pairwise vs. score sum) — not "preference," which is too slippery to identify a method on its own.

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