[EM] the name of the rose

[James Green-Armytage]

Dear John Hodges, and other voting fans,

you write:
>Condorcet advocates might consider a name change; call it "tournament 
>runoff". At least some types of sports (Chess, Judo, maybe others) 
>hold tournaments where every contestant is paired off versus every 
>other in turn. It might be easier to sell the idea to the public if 
>you present it as a round-robin tournament between all candidates. If 
>one emerges undefeated from all possible two-person runoffs, they are 
>declared the tournament champion. If nobody is undefeated, then we 
>name ________________ as the tournament winner.

I reply:

	Yes, I've been thinking about this. Obviously the name "Condorcet's
method" is woefully inadequate for any kind of slick public relations
campaign in the US.
	The term "tournament voting" occurred to me. "Tournament runoff" may
indeed make more sense than that.
	Another possibility is "pairwise voting," a term which is already used to
some degree in theory circles, is somewhat descriptive of how the method
works, and which has kind of a nice ring to it, also happening to contain
the word 'wise,' which is a good association to make with Condorcet's
method.

	I agree that it makes good sense to explain Condorcet's method to people
as a round robin tournament. However, when contrasting IRV to Condorcet,
there is not all that much benefit to be had from comparing IRV to an
elimination tournament, because it eliminates candidates based on their
position in relation to the whole field, rather than a pairwise loss
against a single other candidate. That is, elimination tournaments make
more sense than IRV, so the comparison won't help illustrate the
advantages of Condorcet.

	Which gives me a (silly) idea for a new voting system. This is *not* a
serious proposal, but a novelty Condorcet version:

	Create a single elimination tournament between all the candidates, just
as you would construct a tennis tournament, where players are seeded, and
the top seeds face off against the bottom seeds at the beginning, and
don't meet each other until later on. Top seeds get a by in early rounds
if there is an odd number of candidates. The seeding could be determined
by first choice votes, or Borda score, or whatever you like. The
tournament itself, of course, would consist of pairwise competitions
between candidates who are matched up against each other, resulting in a
semi-final, a final, and a winner.
	This method will always select a Condorcet winner and never select a
Condorcet loser, but I can't imagine any reason to choose it over ranked
pairs or beatpath!

>The blank must be filled in a way that is easily understood. Suppose 
>we said "the one who wins the greatest number of two-person runoffs". 

	I wouldn't want to compromise the completion method to make it more
sellable. I would probably just fill in the blank by saying that the
winner of a cycle is the one whose worst defeat is by the fewest number of
points (Condorcet's own suggestion, equivalent to "sequential dropping,"
or "successive reversal"), and then if anyone gets really interested (and
when laws are being drafted and software written), I will add that the
method should also be Schwartz-efficient and cloneproof. (Which would
bring you to beatpath / CSSD... I'm not totally sure how you would sell
ranked pairs in this way, but I'm sure it can be done if it turns out to
be better.)

	Anyway, trying to find a good name for a voting system is part of the
process of advocacy. CVD is avid about renaming voting systems. Aside from
christening "IRV," they have renamed proportional representation as "full
representation," STV as "choice voting," and perhaps most ambiguously,
they have renamed single non-transferable vote as "the one-vote system."
	I'm not saying that all of this isn't a little overboard, but I will
stand by my earlier point that "Condorcet's method" is really a bad name
for advocacy in the US, being 1. difficult to pronounce, 2. distinctly
foreign and 'non-American,' 3. the name of a person (albeit a long-dead
one), which somehow makes it seem a little bit too personal and egotistic,
not something universal enough to select a president or governor, and 4. a
name which says nothing about how the system actually works.
	I would be curious to know if anyone else has some ideas for slick names
for Condorcet. At this point "pairwise voting" seems like a pretty safe
bet to me, but I could probably be talked out of that.

	I know that all of this may seem a little silly and removed from the more
weighty theoretical questions under discussion. Still, I think it is a
valid topic of conversation for people who want to enter the advocacy
stage of this shebang.


my best,
James