Instant Runoff Voting and the Reinforcement Paradox

We analyze the susceptibility of instant runoff voting (IRV) to a lesser-studied paradox known as a reinforcement paradox, which occurs when candidate X wins under IRV in two distinct elections but X loses in the combined election formed by merging the ballots from the two elections. For three-candidate IRV elections we provide necessary and sufficient conditions under which there exists a partition of the ballot set into two sets of ballots such that a given losing candidate wins each of the sub-elections. Using these conditions, we use Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the frequency with which such partitions exist under various models of voter behavior. We also analyze the frequency with which the paradox in a large dataset of real-world ranked-choice elections to provide empirical probabilities. Our general finding is that IRV is highly susceptible to this paradox in three-candidate elections.

@article{mccune2025_2502.05185,
  title={ Instant Runoff Voting and the Reinforcement Paradox },
  author={ David McCune and Jennifer Wilson },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.05185},
  year={ 2025 }
}