Ranked Choice I and Ranked Choice C
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To some people, "Ranked Choice" means Instant Runoff voting.
To others, "Ranked Choice" means any ranked ballot method, including Borda count and any number of Condorcet compliant methods.
I'm going to suggest that we start referring to the IRV one as Ranked Choice I and Condorcet compliant ones as Ranked Choice C. RCV-I and RCV-C can be the shorthand. (RCV-B could be used for Borda, but since no one is really pushing for Borda, that's probably not going to get a lot of use)
There is a bit of a strategy here, which is, for those of us that think Condorcet is better than IRV, while also acknowledging that IRV is better than FPTP (*), we can push forward without spinning on the details. We can just say we advocate for RCV.
Almost every educated person in the US general public knows what Ranked Choice Voting is by now. I'm saying we should embrace that fact, not fight against it. Meanwhile, Condorcet advocates can "own" the term. Unless someone explicitly says IRV (or RCV-I), we can just treat it as if they are equally speaking of or advocating for all reasonable ranked ballot methods.
(note that some people might misread RCV-I as RCV-one. But that's ok, it is the first to make inroads, so they aren't wrong... )
Another thing you'll notice is that this naming lumps all ranked ballot Condorcet methods together, treating them as a single entity. That's a good thing. The differences are incredibly subtle, so it makes sense to be able to treat them as "one method, with variations" rather than different methods. Yes there are contexts where we want to distinguish them, but in wider contexts (i.e. speaking to the sort of audience that might have heard of Ranked Choice but not others), it would be nice to gloss over the differences so as to stay out of rabbit holes.
* I don't understand how, if someone advocates for Condorcet, they can argue otherwise. In the 440 RCV-I elections where full ballot data was available, RCV-I elected the Condorcet winner in 439.
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Seems rhetorically sound.
I would add RCV-g for generalized RCV, meaning any system that collects ranking ballots, no matter what tallying is used.
Approval-ordered Llull (letter grades) [10], Score // Llull [9], Score, STAR, Approval, other rated Condorcet [8]; equal-ranked Condorcet [4]; strictly-ranked Condorcet [3]; everything else [0].
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That "generalized RCV" should just be called "RCV".
I do not consider it to be terribly forthright of FairVote to quietly relabel the method they were promoting from "IRV" to "RCV". There are two disingenuous motives displayed.
First, around 2010, it wasn't just Burlington repealing IRV, there were some other places that did, even though they did not have the failure that Burlington had in 2009. "IRV" was a label losing cachet and, without changing a thing about the product they were selling, they just changed the label, implying that it might be "new and improved" in some manner or just not the IRV they were selling before. Of course that is not true.
Then the other disingenuous motive is that FairVote is implying that Hare RCV (or IRV) is the only way to tally the ranked ballots. Like Borda or Bucklin or Condorcet are not RCV even though they use virtually the same ballots (Condorcet allows equal rankings on a ballot).
