Does Top 3 Require Everyone to Agree?

No, complete unanimity is an unrealistic standard of determining an election winner. A more realistic standard is given by what social choice theorists call a Condorcet winner, a candidate who defeats every other candidate head-to-head. As Elkind et al. write, “[A] Condorcet winner, when one exists, presents an acceptable compromise between different voters’ preferences. We say that an election is a consensus election if it has a Condorcet winner.” In this spirit, we call the Condorcet winner the Consensus Choice.