 Condorcet envisioned that the above argument could be adapted to voting situations with more than two alternatives. Young (1975, 1988, 1995)  was the first to fully work out this idea (cf. List and Goodin 2001 who generalize the Condorcet Jury   Theorem to more than two alternatives in a different framework).  He showed (among other things) that the Borda Count can be viewed as the maximum likelihood estimator for identifying the best candidate. Conitzer and Sandholm (2005), Conitzer et al. (2009), Xia et al. (2010), and Xia (2016) take these ideas further by classifying different voting methods according to whether or not the methods can be viewed as a maximum likelihood estimator (for a noise model). The most general results along these lines can be found in Pivato 2013 which contains a series of results showing when voting methods can be interpreted as different kinds of statistical ‘estimators’. 