The selective harmonic elimination pulse width modulation (SHEPWM) switching strategy has been applied to multilevel inverters to remove low harmonics. Naturally, the related equations do not have feasible solutions for some operating points associated with the modulation index (M). However, with these infeasible points, minimizing instead of eliminating harmonics is performed. Thus, harmful harmonics such as the $5^{th}$ harmonic still remains in the output waveform. Therefore, it is proposed in this paper to ignore solving the equation associated with the highest order harmonics. A reduction in the eliminated harmonics results in an increase in the degrees of freedom. As a result, the lower order harmonics are eliminated in more operating points. A 9-level inverter is chosen as a case study. The genetic algorithm (GA) for optimization purposes is used. Simulation results verify the proposed method.