Mono-raise criterion

It has been suggested that this article be merged into Monotonicity. (Discuss)

This criteria is one of several sub-cases of the Monotonicity criterion. A voting system satisfies the Mono-raise criterion:

If an alternative X loses, and the ballots are changed only by placing X in lower positions, without changing the relative position of other candidates, then X must still lose.

A looser way of phrasing this is that in a non-monotonic system, voting for a candidate can cause that candidate to lose. Systems which fail the monotonicity criterion suffer a form of tactical voting where voters might try to elect their candidate by voting against that candidate.

Plurality voting, Majority Choice Approval, Borda count, Schulze, Maximize Affirmed Majorities, and Descending Solid Coalitions are monotonic, while Coombs' method and Instant-runoff voting are not. Approval voting is monotonic, using a slightly different definition, because it is not a preferential system: You can never help a candidate by not voting for them.

Some parts of this article are derived from text at https://web.archive.org/web/20090610060543/http://condorcet.org/emr/criteria.shtml which was released to the public domain.