Score: 0

The incompatibility of the Condorcet winner and loser criteria with positive involvement and resolvability

Published: January 15, 2026 | arXiv ID: 2601.10506v2

By: Wesley H. Holliday

Potential Business Impact:

No voting system can be perfectly fair to all.

Business Areas:
A/B Testing Data and Analytics

We prove that there is no preferential voting method satisfying the Condorcet winner and loser criteria, positive involvement (if a candidate $x$ wins in an initial preference profile, then adding a voter who ranks $x$ uniquely first cannot cause $x$ to lose), and $n$-voter resolvability (if $x$ initially ties for winning, then $x$ can be made the unique winner by adding up to $n$ voters). In a previous note, we proved an analogous result assuming an additional axiom of ordinal margin invariance, which we now show is unnecessary for an impossibility theorem, at least if the desired voting method is defined for five-candidate elections.

Page Count
6 pages

Category
Economics:
Theoretical Economics