Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index In voting systems, independence of irrelevant alternatives is the property some voting systems have that, if one option (X) wins the election, and a new alternative (Y) is added, only X or Y will win the election. A less strict property is sometimes called local independence of irrelevant alternatives. It says that if one option (X) wins an election, and a new alternative (Y) is added, X will win the election if Y is not in the Smith set. All Condorcet methods fail the former criterion, but some satisfy the latter. None of the Borda count, Coombs' method or Instant-runoff voting meet either criterion. Some text of this article is derived with permission from http://condorcet.org/emr/criteria.shtml This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.