Remember the counting pattern, counts[x] = counts.get(x, 0) + 1? collections.Counter does it in one step, and adds useful extras:

from collections import Counter

counts = Counter("mississippi")
print(counts)
print(counts["s"], counts["z"])
print(counts.most_common(2))

votes = Counter(["red", "blue", "red", "green", "red"])
print(votes.most_common(1)[0])

A Counter is a dictionary that gives 0 for missing keys instead of a KeyError, and .most_common(n) gives the n most common items with their counts, biggest first.