Does no perfectly fair electoral system exist?

The story of this vote is not the margin but the shrug that accompanied it. Two to one, voters here sided with Cambridge and Copenhagen's mathematicians that no electoral system can deliver local representation, proportionality and a fixed parliament size all at once — yet the debate that produced that result was thin, and half of it was voters complaining about the question rather than answering it.

The Yes case, such as it was, split between resignation and a demand for nuance. The most-respected opinion on the page conceded the premise but refused to let it end the conversation: "there are some that are fair & representative of others, they're just more complicated & costly more to run," pointing to single transferable votes as closer to fair than first-past-the-post. Another Yes voter reached past electoral mechanics entirely to direct democracy, invoking Brexit as "such great exercise," while a third simply reached for the aphorism doing most of the chamber's thinking: "the perfect is the enemy of the good."

The No side barely argued at all — its two opinions, tied on a single respect vote each, objected not to the mathematics but to the framing, one voter noting it was "highly unlikely that a perfectly fair electoral system exists" while still voting no because the question felt like a trap, the other simply finding it "hard to fathom what actually is being asked." Neither side, in other words, seriously disputed the impossibility theorem itself — the disagreement was almost entirely about whether the question deserved a straight answer.

That the chamber accepted a mathematical impossibility result with so little resistance says something about how thoroughly first-past-the-post's flaws have been absorbed here, after a run of elections in Westminster, Berlin and Copenhagen where local seats, national vote share and chamber size have visibly pulled against each other. The fault line over PR, STV and fixed boundaries has not gone away — it has simply been conceded as unwinnable in principle, even by those still fighting for it in practice.

A result this lopsided, on a question this abstract, mostly proves that voters here would rather argue about which imperfect system to choose than whether perfection is possible at all.