@democrates I meant a Condorcet winner only among the front runners (for example, the candidates with the top K scores, here we are taking K=2). If there is no Condorcet winner among them, then the top scoring candidate should win.
In your case, if two candidates have the same second-greatest score, and the three front runners form a Condorcet cycle, then you can use the scores to break the tie. If this was used, then Jill Stein would have won the election.
That isn’t “the correct” solution (there is no such thing), but it is somewhat less arbitrary than flipping a coin or operating by alphabetical order, neither of which has anything to do with relevant information that is readily available on the ballots.
If we were being engineers about choosing a high quality candidate to win the election, we could even compute the distribution of scores, take the candidates whose scores exceed some elbow point, and find the Condorcet winner among those candidates with the top scoring candidate as the backup if no Condorcet winner exists. That’s basically a generalization of STAR with a dynamic front-runner selection method.
There are other ways to proceed. For example, we could remove Condorcet losers, then try to find the Condorcet winner of all remaining candidates, iteratively eliminating the lowest scoring candidate until a Condorcet winner emerges.