“Spoilers” Spoil Nothing
Summary: The concept of spoilers, as defined by Fairvote, is analyzed and demonstrated to be useless for deciding whether Instant Runoff or either of the clone-free, Condorcet methods of Beatpath or Ranked Pairs is a better method to decide elections that use ranked-choice ballots. The problem of finding all patterns of ballots that generate spoilers that are not merely clones is solved for the general case of 4 candidates, and for 4 candidates restricted to a spatial model in two dimensions.
