View source for Independence of Irrelevant Ballots

IIB is strongly connected to the [[Blank Ballot Criterion]]. It says that a voter who has no preference between any candidates should not impact which of them wins or loses by voting.

A generalization of this concept is to treat an irrelevant ballot as simply being a ballot with no preference between the candidates in a set of candidates, and the requirement as being that that ballot shouldn't impact who wins or loses among that set of candidates. 

In general, [[Largest remainder method|Largest remainder methods]] violate this criterion because an irrelevant voter will change the size of the quota. See the [[Divisor method#Notes|Highest-averages method#Notes]] article for an example.