Majority Element Failing to close cycles - perl

Question

I'm trying to figure out why this keeps printing the "majority element" candidate in every cycle.
The code I've been trying to make work is a Majority Element search (to find an element that is repeated more than half of the length of a list).
I can't separate the processes of finding the candidate and testing against the array because my input is a text file that has an indeterminate number of arrays. It's an exercise from rosalind.info that has different inputs every time you try to solve it.
An example of the input would be
-5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 -8 7 7 7 1 7 3 7 -7 1 6 5 10 100 1000 1 -5 1 6 7 1 1 10 1
Here's what I've written so far.
foreach my $currentrow (#lists) {
my #row = ();
#row = split( /\s/, $currentrow );
my $length = $#row;
my $count = 0;
my $i = 0;
for $i ( 0 .. $length - 1 ) {
if ( $count == 0 ) {
$candidate = $row[$i];
$count++;
}
if ( ( $count > 0 ) and ( $i = $length - 1 ) ) {
my $counter2 = 0;
for my $j ( 0 .. $length - 1 ) {
if ( $row[$j] == $candidate ) {
$counter2++;
}
}
if ( $counter2 <= ( $#row / 2 ) and ( $i = $length - 1 ) ) {
$candidate = -1;
print $candidate, " ", $i, " ";
}
if ( $counter2 > ( $#row / 2 ) and ( $i = $length - 1 ) ) {
print $candidate, " ", $i, " ";
}
}
if ( $candidate == $row[$i] and $count > 0 ) {
$count = $count + 1;
}
if ( $candidate != $row[$i] and $count > 0 ) {
$count = $count - 1;
}
}
}

Answer 1

Do you have use strict and use warnings 'all' in place?
I imagine that your problem may be because of the test $i = $length - 1, which is an assignment, and should be $i == $length - 1

Answer 2

To find a majority element I would use a hash:
perl -nae '%h=(); $h{$_}+=2 for #F; $h{$_}>#F and print for keys %h; print "\n"'
Each line of input is treated separately. Each line of output matches a line of input and presents its majority element or is empty if there is no such element.
Edit: Now the solution uses autosplit (-a), which is shorter and work not only for numbers.