Defending Elections Against Malicious Spread of Misinformation

The integrity of democratic elections depends on voters' access to accurate information. However, modern media environments, which are dominated by social media, provide malicious actors with unprecedented ability to manipulate elections via misinformation, such as fake news. We study a zero-sum game between an attacker, who attempts to subvert an election by propagating a fake new story or other misinformation over a set of advertising channels, and a defender who attempts to limit the attacker's impact. Computing an equilibrium in this game is challenging as even the pure strategy sets of players are exponential. Nevertheless, we give provable polynomial-time approximation algorithms for computing the defender's minimax optimal strategy across a range of settings, encompassing different population structures as well as models of the information available to each player. Experimental results confirm that our algorithms provide near-optimal defender strategies and showcase variations in the difficulty of defending elections depending on the resources and knowledge available to the defender.Comment: Full version of paper accepted to AAAI 201

Optimal defense against election control by deleting voter groups

Election control encompasses attempts from an external agent to alter the structure of an election in order to change its outcome. This problem is both a fundamental theoretical problem in social choice, and a major practical concern for democratic institutions. Consequently, this issue has received considerable attention, particularly as it pertains to different voting rules. In contrast, the problem of how election control can be prevented or deterred has been largely ignored. We introduce the problem of optimal defense against election control, including destructive and constructive control, where manipulation is allowed at the granularity of groups of voters (e.g., voting locations) through a denial-of-service attack, and the defender allocates limited protection resources to prevent control. We consider plurality voting, and show that it is computationally hard to prevent both types of control, though destructive control itself can be performed in polynomial time. For defense against destructive control, we present a double-oracle framework for computing an optimal prevention strategy. We show that both defender and attacker best response subproblems are NP-complete, and develop exact mixed-integer linear programming approaches for solving these, as well as fast heuristic methods. We then extend this general approach to develop effective algorithmic solutions for defense against constructive control. Finally, we generalize the model and algorithmic approaches to consider uncertainty about voter preferences. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real data demonstrate that the proposed computational framework can scale to realistic problem instances.Accepted versio