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. 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 ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info