I'm stuck on how to formulate this problem properly and the following is: What if we had the following values: {('A','B','C','D'):3, ('A','C','B','D'):2, ('B','D','C','A'):4, ('D','C','B','A'):3, ('C','B','A','D'):1, ('C','D','A','B'):1} When we sum up the first place values: [5,4,2,3] (5 people picked for A first, 4 people picked for B first, and so on like A = 5, B = 4, C = 2, D = 3) The maximum values for any alphabet is 5, which isn't a majority (5/14 is less than half), where 14 is the sum of total values. So we remove the alphabet with the fewest first place picks. Which in this case is C. I want to return a dictionary where {'A':5, 'B':4, 'C':2, 'D':3} without importing anything. This is my work: def popular(letter): '''(dict of {tuple of (str, str, str, str): int}) -> dict of {str:int} ''' my_dictionary = {} counter = 0 for (alphabet, picks) in letter.items(): if (alphabet[0]): my_dictionary[alphabet[0]] = picks else: my_dictionary[alphabet[0]] = counter return my_dictionary This returns duplicate of keys which I cannot get rid of. Thanks.