A Condorcet method is any election method that elects the candidate that would win by majority rule in all pairings against the other candidates, whenever one of the candidates has that property. A candidate with that property is called a Condorcet winner (named for the 18th-century French mathematician and philosopher Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, the Marquis de Condorcet, who championed such outcomes). A Condorcet winner doesn't always exist because majority preferences can be like rock-paper-scissors: for each candidate, there can be another that is preferred by some majority (this is known as Condorcet paradox).