[EM] On Naming and Advocacy

[Dave Ketchum]

Trying clarification for RRT:

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 15:28:44 EDT RLSuter at aol.com wrote:

> How about instant pairwise voting (IPV) as a good
> descriptive name for Condorcet? I'm just throwing
> this out, not advocating it. It apparently hasn't been
> used much, because a Google search resulted in
> no hits. So that would be one drawback, though I
> think a minor one. Its big advantage is that IPV is
> a three letter description that highlights both key
> similarities with IRV (they are both INSTANT forms
> of VOTING that require voters to rank their candidate
> preferences) and the key difference (IRV simulates
> runoff voting while IPV simulates pairwise voting).
> 
> To clarify my objections to Brian Olson's suggestion
> of virtual instant round robin tournament and Dave
> Ketchum's suggestion of just round robin tournament
> (RRT):
> 
> 1. Calling one instant and the other virtual will cause
> more confusion than will be caused by similarities
> in abbreviations, because it suggests that the two
> methods are different in some important way, one
> being an "instant" method and the other being a
> "virtual" method. But in fact, the two words mean
> exactly the same thing when used to describe the
> two methods. To avoid confusion, the same word
> should be used for both.
> 
> 2. Calling one a form of voting and the other a kind of
> tournament will cause additional confusion. No other
> voting method I know of is called a tournament. Also,
> elections are not really tournaments. It is voters, not
> candidates, who engage in the primary activity involved
> in elections, namely voting. Candidates are normally
> required to remain inactive while voting is carried
> out. So the word tournament won't seem, to most
> people, an appropriate word for describing elections.


DEPENDS on the picture we paint:
      The candidates have campaigned, each trying to earn a high ranking 
among all voters.
      Each voter scores a tournament, in which each ranked candidate loses 
to those the voter ranks higher, and wins over those the voter ranks lower 
plus those not ranked.
      The counting sums the tournament wins from all the voters:
           A clear winner is expected - one who the sum of voters agree 
wins more then loses against every other candidate.
           Cycles can happen, such as A>B & B>C & C>A, while these three 
win over all other candidates.  The three are near ties and need more 
analysis to decide which wins.

> 
> One other alternative, and one I have preferred in the
> past, is IRRV as an abbreviation for instant round robin
> voting. Steve Eppley argued in favor of IRR because it
> is shorter and perfectly adequate. But because it omits
> the V for voting (unlike IRV as well as AV, RV and other
> methods), IRR is less fully and clearly descriptive than
> IRRV.
> 
> Maybe we should vote on this.
> 
> -Ralph Suter

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  Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
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