2,454 research outputs found
X THEN X: Manipulation of Same-System Runoff Elections
Do runoff elections, using the same voting rule as the initial election but
just on the winning candidates, increase or decrease the complexity of
manipulation? Does allowing revoting in the runoff increase or decrease the
complexity relative to just having a runoff without revoting? For both weighted
and unweighted voting, we show that even for election systems with simple
winner problems the complexity of manipulation, manipulation with runoffs, and
manipulation with revoting runoffs are independent, in the abstract. On the
other hand, for some important, well-known election systems we determine what
holds for each of these cases. For no such systems do we find runoffs lowering
complexity, and for some we find that runoffs raise complexity. Ours is the
first paper to show that for natural, unweighted election systems, runoffs can
increase the manipulation complexity
Schulze and Ranked-Pairs Voting are Fixed-Parameter Tractable to Bribe, Manipulate, and Control
Schulze and ranked-pairs elections have received much attention recently, and
the former has quickly become a quite widely used election system. For many
cases these systems have been proven resistant to bribery, control, or
manipulation, with ranked pairs being particularly praised for being NP-hard
for all three of those. Nonetheless, the present paper shows that with respect
to the number of candidates, Schulze and ranked-pairs elections are
fixed-parameter tractable to bribe, control, and manipulate: we obtain uniform,
polynomial-time algorithms whose degree does not depend on the number of
candidates. We also provide such algorithms for some weighted variants of these
problems
Manipulation and Control Complexity of Schulze Voting
Schulze voting is a recently introduced voting system enjoying unusual
popularity and a high degree of real-world use, with users including the
Wikimedia foundation, several branches of the Pirate Party, and MTV. It is a
Condorcet voting system that determines the winners of an election using
information about paths in a graph representation of the election. We resolve
the complexity of many electoral control cases for Schulze voting. We find that
it falls short of the best known voting systems in terms of control resistance,
demonstrating vulnerabilities of concern to some prospective users of the
system
Combining Voting Rules Together
We propose a simple method for combining together voting rules that performs
a run-off between the different winners of each voting rule. We prove that this
combinator has several good properties. For instance, even if just one of the
base voting rules has a desirable property like Condorcet consistency, the
combination inherits this property. In addition, we prove that combining voting
rules together in this way can make finding a manipulation more computationally
difficult. Finally, we study the impact of this combinator on approximation
methods that find close to optimal manipulations
Normalized Range Voting Broadly Resists Control
We study the behavior of Range Voting and Normalized Range Voting with
respect to electoral control. Electoral control encompasses attempts from an
election chair to alter the structure of an election in order to change the
outcome. We show that a voting system resists a case of control by proving that
performing that case of control is computationally infeasible. Range Voting is
a natural extension of approval voting, and Normalized Range Voting is a simple
variant which alters each vote to maximize the potential impact of each voter.
We show that Normalized Range Voting has among the largest number of control
resistances among natural voting systems
A Smooth Transition from Powerlessness to Absolute Power
We study the phase transition of the coalitional manipulation problem for
generalized scoring rules. Previously it has been shown that, under some
conditions on the distribution of votes, if the number of manipulators is
, where is the number of voters, then the probability that a
random profile is manipulable by the coalition goes to zero as the number of
voters goes to infinity, whereas if the number of manipulators is
, then the probability that a random profile is manipulable
goes to one. Here we consider the critical window, where a coalition has size
, and we show that as goes from zero to infinity, the limiting
probability that a random profile is manipulable goes from zero to one in a
smooth fashion, i.e., there is a smooth phase transition between the two
regimes. This result analytically validates recent empirical results, and
suggests that deciding the coalitional manipulation problem may be of limited
computational hardness in practice.Comment: 22 pages; v2 contains minor changes and corrections; v3 contains
minor changes after comments of reviewer
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