Can't upvote that enough. Thanks jmeek

Apparently, the logic is that your algorithm is supposed to collect the names of all candidates before checking vote totals. Therefore :c would have been eliminated in the first round because :c recieved 0 votes.

I agree that the last test case is faultly. If you look at the raw data and follow the requirements, 'c' is the winner instead of 'e'.

The random testcase has a lot of problems

same to you...

[[["a", "c", "b", "d", "e"],
["d", "c", "a", "b", "e"],
["e", "b", "d", "a", "c"],
["e", "a", "b", "c", "d"],
["b", "c", "e", "a", "d"]],
"e"],

i think this is not right