Mathematical analysis reveals the likelihood of a condorcet winner decreases in large voting contests, suggesting important implications for electoral outcomes.
We study a mathematical model of voting contest with m voters and n candidates, with each voter ranking the candidates in order of preference, without ties. A Condorcet winner is a candidate who gets more than $m/2$ votes in pairwise contest with every other candidate. An ``impartial culture'' setting is the case when each voter chooses his/her candidate preference list uniformly at random from all $n!$ preferences, and does it independently of all other voters. For impartial culture case, Robert May and Lisa Sauermann showed that when $m=2k-1$ is fixed ($k=2$ and $k>2$ respectively), and n grows indefinitely, the probability of a Condorcet winner is small, of order n-(k-1)/k. We show that when m grows indefinitely and m n⁴, the probability of a Condercet winner is of order n⁻¹log1/2n · loglog n, thus converges to zero.
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Boris Pittel (2025) studied this question.
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