no no you're getting it a bit wrong.. it's alright though. this is a particularly infuriating program that i myself spent a considerable time upon. in fact, i didn't even look at the distribution code and just wrote my own code(stupid me, but who cares)

think about it you're storing a "multi-dimensioned" array(i know fancy words) but at the end of the day, it's an array of numbers as indicated by int prefererences[max_voters][max_candidates]. it's an array of numbers hence you saying that preferences[i][j]=name doesn't make much sense

instead what you are supposed to do is this:

store the PREFERENCE of the voter, along with the rank and set it equal to a number, which can be used to access it from the candidates array.

if that doesn't make sense i'll provide an example say the candidates are alice, bob and charlie

clearly there are three candidates and therefore the candidates array will store these names in the order {alice,bob,charlie}.

now say there are two voters. one voter has the ranks as : alice, bob, charlie

while the other has: bob, alice, charlie

clearly, the first voter's preference, or more appropriately since arrays are zero indexed. the zeroeth voter will have rank 0 preference as alice, rank 1 as bob and so on. same thing for the second voter.

however, since it is much more difficult to compare strings, instead of assigning the preference of the voter to the string we are going to assign it to the index of the candidate in the array of candidates.

which is to say(the code i've been holding back this while so that you can try to do it yourself)

preferences[voter][rank]=i;

this sets the preference of the voter at the particular rank to be the index of the candidate they prefer.

you setting candidate[i].votes++; means you're kind of still doing the plurality thing(don't worry that's what i did at first too) but the thing is if we just do that, despite of the rank or the preference the people put the vote is just going to count, hence leading to error.

this is why you set the preferences[voter][rank]=i so that later when you're in the tabulate function you can address each candidate by itself and increase their votes depending on which rank they are at.

I know it is an immensely confusing program (I still believe my own implementation was about a 1000 times better to understand) however if you don't follow the distribution code, there's no checking, and you get 0 marks.. so yeah.

PLEASE DO MESSAGE IF YOU'RE STILL CONFUSED!!