  Whitney's broken circuit theorem gives a graphical example to reduce the
number of the terms in the sum of the inclusion-exclusion formula by a
predicted cancellation. So far, the known cancellations for the formula
strongly depend on the prescribed (linear or partial) ordering on the index
set. We give a new cancellation method, which does not require any ordering on
the index set. Our method extends all the `ordering-based' methods known in the
literatures and in general reduces more terms. As examples, we use our method
to improve some relevant results on graph polynomials.
