Paste the ballots — one person per line, options in order of preference — and this compares every option head-to-head with every other. The Condorcet winner is the option that would beat each of the others in a one-on-one majority vote. If no such option exists (a Condorcet cycle, the voting paradox), it says so and ranks by Copeland score instead. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
Separate each ballot's options with >, a comma, or a tab. Names are matched case-insensitively. A ballot may rank as few options as the voter likes — any options it leaves off are treated as tied below the ones it ranked.
The Condorcet method looks at every pair of options and asks: if it were just these two on the ballot, which would more voters rank higher? An option that wins all of its head-to-head matchups is the Condorcet winner — arguably the fairest single winner, because no other option is preferred to it by a majority. This calculator builds the full pairwise matrix (every one-on-one score), marks each matchup's winner, and reports whether a Condorcet winner exists.
Sometimes majorities point in a circle: A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A. Then there is no Condorcet winner at all — this is the Condorcet paradox, and it's a real feature of group preferences, not a bug in the count. Try the ballots A>B>C, B>C>A, C>A>B to see one. When it happens this tool shows the cycle and falls back to the Copeland ranking. For a stronger, widely-used way to resolve cycles, try the Schulze method calculator, which ranks options by the strength of their beatpaths.
Five voters: two rank Left > Center > Right, two rank Right > Center > Left, and one ranks Center > Left > Right. On first preferences Center has just one vote and would be eliminated first under instant-runoff. But head-to-head, Center beats Left 3–2 and beats Right 3–2, so Center is the Condorcet winner — the broadly-acceptable compromise. Load the example above to see the full matrix.
The instant-runoff (RCV) count can eliminate a strong compromise early because it only looks at first preferences each round; Condorcet never does, since it weighs every pairing. The Borda count scores positions rather than matchups, so it can pick a different winner again. Running the same ballots through all three is the quickest way to see how sensitive your result is to the counting rule. Want each person to submit their own ranking instead of pasting? Create a shared rankit poll — one link, no signup.
Is there always a Condorcet winner? No. When preferences cycle there is none; that's the paradox above, and the Copeland ranking gives the fairest ordering in that case.
Do ballots have to rank every option? No. Unranked options are treated as tied at the bottom of that ballot.
Is anything sent to a server? No. The whole count runs in your browser, so you can paste real ballots safely.