A Condorcet winner (French: [kɔ̃dɔʁsɛ], English: /kɒndɔːrˈseɪ/) is a candidate who would receive the support of more than half of the electorate in a one-on-one race against any one of their opponents. Voting systems where a majority winner will always win are said to satisfy the Condorcet winner criterion. The Condorcet winner criterion extends the principle of majority rule to elections with multiple candidates.
Named after Nicolas de Condorcet, it is also called a majority winner, a majority-preferred candidate, a beats-all winner, or tournament winner (by analogy with round-robin tournaments). A Condorcet winner may not necessarily always exist in a given electorate: it is possible to have a rock paper scissors-style cycle, when multiple candidates defeat each other (rock < paper < scissors < rock). This is called Condorcet's voting paradox, and is analogous to the counterintuitive intransitive dice phenomenon known in probability. However, the Smith set, a generalization of the Condorcet criteria that is the smallest set of candidates that are pairwise unbeaten by every candidate outside of it, will always exist.
