Does IRV violate important election fairness criteria?
No. While every voting method ever conceived fails some evaluation criteria in some scenarios, IRV does better than most, and does not violate any of the most important ones. A large number of criteria have been proposed to evaluate voting methods. However, many of these are mutually exclusive — that is, any voting method that satisfies criterion A must of necessity, fail criterion B. There is no perfect voting method, since no voting method satisfies all of these criteria, so it is a matter of weighing the relative severity of a potential “pathological” outcome, and the likelihood of such a scenario occurring in real-world public elections. Many political scientists have concluded that IRV is the best and fairest single-winner election method because it satisfies more of the crucial criteria than other methods, and its potential failings are relatively minor and unlikely to occur. Some of the crucial criteria that IRV satisfies and that other methods, such as Plurality, Approval, Bor
