Properties and limits — what STAR guarantees, and what it doesn't

The honest half of the pitch: the formal properties STAR satisfies, the criteria it deliberately trades away, and the edge behaviors worth knowing before a debate.

Start with STAR's honest limits — the page that concedes everything worth conceding, on purpose.

• Monotonicity — scoring a candidate higher can never hurt them (the property IRV famously lacks).
• Criteria failures — the criteria STAR fails, with runnable cases, not hand-waving.
• Favorite betrayal (301) — when strategic voters still have something to gain, and how much.
• Residual vote-splitting — what's left of the spoiler effect after STAR shrinks it.
• Equally weighted vote — the equality guarantee behind the "equal vote" name.
• Summability — precinct subtotals add up (unlike IRV), and why auditors care.
• Abstention vs. zero vs. NOTA — three different "didn't vote for them" cases and how the count treats each.
• Nonstandard scales — what changes (and doesn't) off the 0–5 ballot.
• Three winner notions — score winner, runoff winner, Condorcet winner: when they coincide and when they can't.

Up: STAR concepts.