My morning coffee hasn’t kicked in… I wonder what the significance is that no voting system can be “perfect”. Is it a fluke of math, or does it say something about the coherence of our value systems as they pertain to electoral systems?
I should also express my view that a plurality voting system that allows only two parties to thrive in practice is probably the worst of all worlds where it concerns voting systems. I believe the polarizing effects of a system that requires exactly two parties are a large component of the set of difficulties that make it so politics is the mind-killer.
No voting system can deal with people who have arbitrary preferences. I’ve lost track of the first time I looked into this, but I’m pretty sure that if you map preference space, impose a metric, and say that each candidate and voter choose a location in that space and the votes go in proportion to the distance by that metric, it gets around Arrow by imposing the requirement “voters may only express a preference that their representatives share their preferences”, which is reasonable but still violates the theorem’s preconditions.
My morning coffee hasn’t kicked in… I wonder what the significance is that no voting system can be “perfect”. Is it a fluke of math, or does it say something about the coherence of our value systems as they pertain to electoral systems?
I should also express my view that a plurality voting system that allows only two parties to thrive in practice is probably the worst of all worlds where it concerns voting systems. I believe the polarizing effects of a system that requires exactly two parties are a large component of the set of difficulties that make it so politics is the mind-killer.
No voting system can deal with people who have arbitrary preferences. I’ve lost track of the first time I looked into this, but I’m pretty sure that if you map preference space, impose a metric, and say that each candidate and voter choose a location in that space and the votes go in proportion to the distance by that metric, it gets around Arrow by imposing the requirement “voters may only express a preference that their representatives share their preferences”, which is reasonable but still violates the theorem’s preconditions.