FairVote

FairVote (formerly the Center for Voting and Democracy) is a 501(c)(3) organization that advocates electoral reform in the United States.

Founded in 1992 as "Citizens for Proportional Representation", they changed their name in 1993 to "Center for Voting and Democracy (CVD)" to reflect a broadening of focus from proportional representation to include work on single-winner reform, such as Australian-style "preferential voting". In 2004, CVD changed the organization's name to FairVote to reflect support for platforms as instant-runoff voting, for single-winner elections, a national popular vote for president, a right to vote amendment to the United States Constitution, and universal voter registration. FairVote releases regular publications on the state of the U.S. electoral system, including Dubious Democracy and Monopoly Politics.

Leadership
Rob Richie has been the President and CEO of FairVote since its formation in 1992. Former congressman and U.S. presidential candidate John Anderson was the chair for the board of directors for many years. The current chair of FairVote's board of directors is Alice Underwood.

Renaming "preferential voting"

 * see also: IRV

Prior to FairVote's work, the single-winner version of single transferable vote was primarily used outside of the United States (e.g. in Australia), and was known in Australia as "preferential voting".

In commentary published in the New York Times in 1992, John Anderson referred to the single-winner system as "majority preference voting".

In 1993, FairVote's first annual report referred to the system as "preference voting", which included the following caveat: ''A Note on Terminology: Reflecting the range of contributors, this report has some inconsistencies in terminology to describe different voting systems. In addition, what many call the "single transferable vote" here is termed "preference voting" in order to focus on the voting process rather than the ballot count.''

In 1997, FairVote began referring to preferential voting as "Instant Runoff voting". Though the term "ranked-choice voting" existed as early as 1999, they didn't appear to start using the term in earnest until 2006, and didn't deprecate the term "instant runoff voting" until 2013.

FairVote CA
FairVote CA is the California chapter of FairVote.

FairVote WA
FairVote WA is the Washington state chapter of FairVote. It was formerly known as the "Washington Citizens for Proportional Representation".

Links

 * Center for Voting and Democracy
 * Democracy USA