[EM] pairwise as best popular name for Condorcet voting

[RLSuter at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/20/04, James Green-Armytage writes:

> For a salable Condorcet name, I think that "pairwise" or "pairwise voting"
> is pretty good. It's been used for a long time already, so it should not
> cause too much confusion. Also, I don't really find acronyms to be that
> attractive, if they can be easily avoided. I think that "pairwise" has a
> nice ring to it, it connotes "wise", and it's highly descriptive of the
> method itself.

It's been used by voting methods specialists but not by ordinary
people. It's a technical term that is not even in most dictionaries,
and very few people except specialists are familiar with it. Also,
it doesn't seem very usefully descriptive. No one, to my
knowledge, is advocating for popular elections a form of Condorcet
that requires voters to do pairwise comparisons of each candidate
against each other candidate. People are, on the other hand,
familar with both runoff elections and round robin tournaments,
or at least they are familiar with the individual words "round"
and "robin" and the idea of round robin tournaments can easily
be explained to anyone. I just don't think pairwise would work
very well, elegant though it may seem. The important question
is what will actually work best given what you might call the
current "popular terminological environment."

-Ralph Suter