This is an informal introduction to the Condorcet voting method, which is used by the Fellowship in formal votes.

How does it work?

It's very similar to a soccer tournament.

In a soccer tournament
Suppose you have three teams: Argentina, Brazil and Chile. Every team plays every other team once. The team that wins the most matches wins the tournament.

For example, if:

• Argentina beats Brazil
• Argentina beats Chile
• Brazil beats Chile

Then the winner is Argentina, followed by Brazil and last is Chile.

In Condorcet
Suppose we have 3 candidates: Amy, Beth, Charon:

1. Every voter ranks the candidates in order of preference.
2. Find the preferred candidate for each pair.
3. The candidate that wins most pairs, wins the election.

For example, suppose that the votes are like this:

25 people vote: Amy, Beth, Charon
35 people vote: Beth, Amy, Charon
40 people vote: Charon, Amy, Beth

Then, for example, 65 people prefer Amy to Beth, and 35 people prefer Beth over Amy. Do a tally for all pairs:

Then the winner is Amy, followed by Beth, and last is Charon.

Resolving conflicts - Ranked Pairs

There is a small chance that no candidate is preferred over every other candidate. For example:

2 people vote: A, B, C
3 people vote: B, C, A
4 people vote: C, A, B

The tally then is:

We use the Ranked Pairs method to solve this conflict:

1. List the pairs from largest margin to smallest margin.
   C beats A by 5 votes
   A beats B by 3 votes
   B beats C by 1 vote
2. Take the top pair. In this case, C > A.
3. Take the next pair, A > B.
   Does A > B conflict with C > A? No.
   We keep A > B, so we end up with C > A > B.
4. Take the next pair, B > C.
   Does B > C conflict with C > A > B? Yes.
   Reject B > C

Final result: C > A > B

Benefits of Condorcet over other methods

Sensible results
With Condornet, if a majority prefers Amy over Beth then Beth will not win. If Amy is preferred to every other candidate, then Amy will win.

This is not true for other voting methods. Take this example:

40% vote Republican (a conservative party)
35% vote Democrat (a liberal party)
25% vote Green (a liberal party)

Clearly most voters are liberal, but with a traditional system, the conservative party would win.

Strategic voting
As a result, other systems encourage "insincere" votes. For example, you might prefer Green but choose to vote Democrat because you dislike them less than Republican.

With Condorcet there is no such strategy. You will always get the best result by voting sincerely.