[EM] Arrow/Gibbard and impossibility (Re: Scientific American and the "Perfect Electoral System")

[Richard, the VoteFair guy]

Just because it's impossible to get zero IIA failure rates doesn't mean 
"we have to let go of" it, in the sense of not trying to reduce IIA 
failures.

Although all methods fail IIA, measuring HOW OFTEN those failures occur 
is insightful.  Some methods have much higher failure rates than others.

As I've said before, I believe reducing failure rates is more important 
than regarding fairness criteria as pass/fail (yes/no) flags that are 
worth counting simplistically.

Richard Fobes
The VoteFair guy


On 11/11/2023 3:57 PM, Forest Simmons wrote:
> At the time it seemed revolutionary. ... but with hindsight it is clear 
> that IIA is the sole culprit ... it's the one we have to let go of.
> 
> Even Majority Judgment which comes as close as possible to IIA ... will 
> predictably fail when voters are given the opportunity to change their 
> judgment after their ballots have been exhausted at the top or bottom 
> from candidate withdrawals.
> 
> It's too bad that after all of this time nobody but Toby and Markus 
> Schulze (who first pointed it out to me more than twenty years ago) 
> seems to have noticed this almost embarrassing take-away from Arrow's 
> most famous theorem.
> 
> Too bad ... because the misconception thus perpetuated is still beimg 
> used with impunity to excuse all kinds of garbage.
> 
> fws
> 
> On Sat, Nov 11, 2023, 3:22 AM Toby Pereira <tdp201b at yahoo.co.uk 
> <mailto:tdp201b at yahoo.co.uk>> wrote:

...