[YokoZar]

It's not dictators that are ok, it's the overly strictly defined "independence of irrelevant alternatives"

It is entirely possible that reasonable voters will end up with a rock-paper-scissors situation among their top three preferences. Such a situation will "break" Arrow's theorem (rock wins an election vs scissors, but when paper enters now scissors wins).

But such a possibility doesn't mean your voting system is bad, it's completely fine to have that happen so long as one of the top rock-paper-scissors cycle wins. This property is true of a whole lot of voting systems that Arrow needlessly dismisses.

[tunesmith]

I'd also argue that if IIA exists, then it might be a good thing. For instance, if a voting population appears to have a clear preference, but then produces a cycle when a new candidate is introduced, it might just be an indication that the first set of candidates were lousy, the voters felt they were compromising, and the first set of candidates didn't represent voter preferences well enough.

[chongli]

Voters are always going to have to compromise. People are extremely complicated and different from one another. Even people who have been married for 50 years have a hard time agreeing on everything. Expand that out into millions of people and the scope for common ground narrows dramatically.