We study randomized allocations (lotteries) of indivisible chores under additive costs and introduce the notion of MMS1, which requires each agent's bundle to satisfy the maximin share (MMS) bound after the removal of at most one chore. Our main result establishes that every instance admits an ex-ante proportional lottery in whose support every allocation is MMS1 and all but $o(n)$ agents satisfy MMS. Consequently, every realized allocation can be made MMS by disposing of at most $o(n)$ chores. The proposed framework further achieves ex-ante proportionality alongside ex-post $4/3$-MMS, $o(n)$-AMMS, or $1$-out-of-$d$ MMS for $d=(1-o(1))n$. These guarantees substantially improve upon state-of-the-art bounds for MMS allocation for chores with disposal or subsidy, best-of-both-worlds fairness, approximate AMMS, and ordinal MMS approximations.
We study the comparison-query complexity of computing allocations that are envy-free up to one item (EF1) for $n$ agents with heterogeneous additive preferences over $m$ indivisible items. In this model, the algorithm may only query which of two bundles an agent prefers, without ever observing numerical valuations or costs. Prior work established $O(\log m)$ query bounds for at most three agents, leaving open whether query complexity logarithmic in $m$ is achievable for every fixed $n \ge 4$. We resolve this open question in the affirmative: for every fixed $n\ge2$, we design algorithms that compute EF1 allocations using $O(\log m)$ comparison queries, matching the known $Ω(\log m)$ lower bound. Our results hold for both chores with nonnegative costs and goods with nonnegative valuations.