Arrow's Impossibility Theorem only applies in cases where ranked preference is the only information in the vote.

The "people", not being an individual or an AI or whatever, has a more complex preference vector than a ranked list. The real world is more complex than that.

So can we now agree that Arrow's Impossibility Theorem doesn't apply to all of democracy, that these things are nuanced and there is a long and deep conversation about this kind of topic that has been going on in the human race for centuries, and that frankly, pointing to technical flaws in established, stable enough systems that were set up by people with a hell of a lot less information about anything than us hundreds of years go is not going to do anything to prevent that system from operating in the way that it does or to convince people who have vested interests in it remaining stable?

Let's say I like party A 10 times more than I like party B. In a preferential voting system, there's no way to precisely express my preferences using the ticket. I'm forced to choose between "1. A" or "1. A, 2. B". Someone else who like part A 2 times more than party B will end up voting identically to me, despite the huge difference between our preferences. Any preferential voting system is necessarily flawed because how limited its input is.

That's basically what Arrow's impossibility theorem says. Due to its limited inputs, a preferential voting system will necessarily fail one of the three fairness criteria.

There are far better voting schemes out there, none of which are affected by Arrow's impossibility theorem.

That's actually exactly what I had in mind. Range voting[0], for example, doesn't suffer from Arrow's impossibility theorem, Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem, nor the Condorcet's paradox.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting