Toby at work sent me an interesting New Scientist article on voting systems.

Entitled 'Electoral dysfunction: Why democracy is always unfair', it argues that due to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, you can never have a perfect voting system. The problem with this argument is that Arrow's Theorem only applies to voting systems where the candidates are put into an ordered list.

Under the range voting system, the voter gives each candidate points out of 10 (or some other number). All the points for each candidate are added up, and the candidate with the highest number of points is the winner. Since range voting doesn't require an ordered list, Arrow's Theorem doesn't apply.