  the condorcet candidate or condorcet winner of an election is the candidate who, when compared with every other candidate, is preferred by more voters. informally, the condorcet winner is the person who would win a two-candidate election against each of the other candidates. a condorcet winner will not always exist in a given set of votes, which is known as condorcet's voting paradox. when voters identify candidates on a left-to-right axis and always prefer candidates closer to themselves, a condorcet winner always exists.black, d. (1948) "on the rationale of group decision-making" the journal of political economy vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 23-34 a voting system satisfies the condorcet criterion if it chooses the condorcet winner when one exists. any method conforming to the condorcet criterion is known as a condorcet method. it is named after the 18th century mathematician and philosopher marie jean antoine nicolas caritat, the marquis de condorcet. == relation to other criteria == the condorcet criterion implies the majority criterion; that is, any system that satisfies the former will satisfy the latter. because of this, arrow's impossibility theorem shows that any method which satisfies the condorcet criterion will not satisfy independence of irrelevant alternatives. the condorcet criterion is also incompatible with the later-no-harm criterion, the participation criterion, and the consistency criterion. == compliance of methods == === complying methods ===  the following methods comply with the condorcet criterion: * black * copeland * dodgson's method * kemeny-young * minimax * nanson's method * ranked pairs * schulze * smith/minimax === non-complying methods === the following methods do not comply with the condorcet criterion. (this statement requires qualification in some cases: see the individual subsections.) * approval voting * borda count * bucklin voting * instant-runoff voting * majority judgment * plurality voting * range voting ==== approval voting ====  approval voting is a system in which the voter can approve of (or vote for) any number of candidates on a ballot. depending on which strategies voters use, the condorcet criterion may be violated. consider an election in which 70% of the voters prefer candidate a to candidate b to candidate c, while 30% of the voters prefer c to b to a. if every voter votes for their top two favorites, candidate b would win (with 100% approval) even though a would be the condorcet winner. note that this failure of approval depends upon a particular generalization of the condorcet criterion, which may not be accepted by all votin
Voting_system_criteria