Condorcet method

Earlier today, Bernie sent out a link to an article that noted that UBC has a need to put together an electronic election that supports the Condorcet method of vote tabulation. He included in his post a link to wikipedia to describe what the method actually is:

Condorcet method - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Our system has a feature that we call preferential voting which allows a voter to rank selections in order of their preference. What the condorcet method is a means of tallying those selections to determine a winner.

Simply put, the method selects a winner between pairs of candidates, for instance selection 'A' and 'B' are compared on all ballots to see how many people liked A more than B and B more than A, not necessarily who picked 'A' or 'B' first on their ballot, just the relative winner between each pair. This is done for all possible pairings on the ballot. Once all ballots have been examined, the Candidate who won the most pairings wins.