Voting Systems
Voting Systems
[White Hat and Ponytail are standing on either side of Cueball who is talking while lifting one hand.] Cueball: I prefer approval voting, but if we're seriously considering instant runoff, then I'll argue for a Condorcet method instead.
[Caption beneath the panel:] Strong Arrow's theorem: The people who find Arrow's theorem significant will never agree on anything anyway.

This comic is about types of single-winner voting systems:
Arrow's impossibility theorem gives a list of criteria for ranked voting systems and states that no system can satisfy all of them at once, despite that for each of them it may seem "obvious" that an electoral system ought to satisfy it. Some voting theorists (such as Cueball) dislike IRV because it fails more of the criteria than Condorcet does.
The primary joke in the comic is the premise that people who are pedantic or knowledgeable enough to find Arrow's theorem to be relevant will self-fulfill the theorem by being inclined to disagree on any effort to change the voting system. This is illustrated by Cueball's voting system preference that is contingent on the preferences of other people, which defeats their effort to produce a community-wide ranking.
A secondary joke in the comic is that often voters don't pick their favorite choice in a vote. Instead, they vote for a less favorable, but more likely electable, person as a way to prevent their least favorite choice from being elected. This is commonly called "spoiler effect"; in Arrow's parlance it is a form of IIA criterion failure . Cueball's strategic vote switch implies that they may be using FPTP (which they dislike) to make the decision, as FPTP is the only system to involve a potential "spoiler effect" (note, however, that certain vote distributions in systems such as IRV can produce a similarly problematic and illogical effect on the outcome).
A third joke is the recursive self-referencing inherent in voting to choose a voting system.
The title text stipulates that Cueball has no fixed ranking of preference for human candidates, but makes this choice dependent on which voting system is favoured by the group. This exceeds strategic voting considerations as the ranking should have full information, whom Cueball prefers in each situation. Therefore Arrow's impossibility theorem and the analysis behind it assume the ranked preferences of an individual voter as a fixed given. To make them dependent on the voting system makes assessing the efficacy of the voting systems absurd or at least much more complicated to do as a general assessment. That is given as the reason why Arrow would wholeheartedly hate him.
[White Hat and Ponytail are standing on either side of Cueball who is talking while lifting one hand.] Cueball: I prefer approval voting, but if we're seriously considering instant runoff, then I'll argue for a Condorcet method instead.
[Caption beneath the panel:] Strong Arrow's theorem: The people who find Arrow's theorem significant will never agree on anything anyway.
