There are a number of different criteria which can be used for

voting system An electoral or voting system is a set of rules used to determine the results of an election. Electoral systems are used in politics to elect governments, while non-political elections may take place in business, nonprofit organizations and inf ...

s in an

election An election is a formal group decision-making process whereby a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold Public administration, public office. Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative d ...

, including the following

Condorcet criterion and similar criteria

Condorcet criterion

Condorcet loser criterion

Smith criterion

Consistency criterion

Homogeneity criterion

Independence criteria

Independence of irrelevant alternatives

Independence of clones criterion

Independence of Smith-dominated alternatives

Later-no criteria

Later-no-harm criterion

Later-no-help criterion

Majority winner and loser

Majority winner criterion

Majority loser criterion

Monotonicity criterion

Proportionality for solid coalitions

Participation criterion

Plurality criterion

Woodall's plurality criterion is a

voting criterion There are a number of different criteria which can be used for voting systems in an election, including the following Condorcet criterion and similar criteria Condorcet criterion Condorcet loser criterion Smith criterion Consistency crit ...

for

ranked voting Ranked voting is any voting system that uses voters' Ordinal utility, rankings of candidates to choose a single winner or multiple winners. More formally, a ranked vote system depends only on voters' total order, order of preference of the cand ...

. It is stated as follows: D R Woodall,
Monotonicity and Single-Seat Election Rules
, ''Voting matters'', Issue 6 (1996), pp. 9–12. :If the number of ballots ranking A as the first preference is greater than the number of ballots on which another candidate B is given any preference

ther than last Ther may refer to: * ''Thér.'', taxonomic author abbreviation of Irénée Thériot (1859–1947), French bryologist * Agroha Mound, archaeological site in Agroha, Hisar district, India * Therapy * Therapeutic drugs See also * ''Ther Thiruvizha'', ...

then A's probability of winning must be no less than B's. Woodall has called the plurality criterion "a rather weak property that surely must hold in any real election" opining that "every reasonable electoral system seems to satisfy it." Among

Condorcet method A Condorcet method (; ) is an election method that elects the candidate who wins a majority of the vote in every head-to-head election against each of the other candidates, whenever there is such a candidate. A candidate with this property, the ...

s which permit truncation, whether the plurality criterion is satisfied depends often on the measure of defeat strength. When ''winning votes'' is used as the measure of defeat strength, plurality is satisfied. Plurality is failed when ''margins'' is used.

Minimax Minimax (sometimes Minmax, MM or saddle point) is a decision rule used in artificial intelligence, decision theory, combinatorial game theory, statistics, and philosophy for ''minimizing'' the possible loss function, loss for a Worst-case scenari ...

using ''pairwise opposition'' also fails plurality. When truncation is permitted under Borda count, the plurality criterion is satisfied when no points are scored to truncated candidates, and ranked candidates receive no fewer votes than if the truncated candidates had been ranked. If truncated candidates are instead scored the average number of points that would have been awarded to those candidates had they been strictly ranked, or if Nauru's modified Borda count is used, the plurality criterion is failed.