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by haswell 1480 days ago
This is an oversimplified conclusion.

FTA:

> The practical consequences of the theorem are debatable: Arrow has said "Most systems are not going to work badly all of the time. All I proved is that all can work badly at times

Followed by:

> Although Arrow's theorem is a mathematical result, it is often expressed in a non-mathematical way with a statement such as no voting method is fair, every ranked voting method is flawed, or the only voting method that isn't flawed is a dictatorship.[11] These statements are simplifications of Arrow's result which are not universally considered to be true.

Bottom line - this seems interesting, but is hardly as simple as "all ranked voting systems can be gamed".

1 comments

> Bottom line - this seems interesting, but is hardly as simple as "all ranked voting systems can be gamed"

It is almost that simple. Every deviation from the unattainable ideal in Arrow’s theorem corresponds to one or more ways that the system:

(1) can be gamed, or

(2) is insensitive to voter preferences, or

(3) changes outcomes in the opposite direction of changes in expressed voter preferences.

(And usually several from multiple categories.)

There are whole catalogs of these and enumerations of which ones apply to each voting system.