Towards a Dichotomy for the Possible Winner Problem in Elections Based on Scoring Rules

To make a joint decision, agents (or voters) are often required to provide their preferences as linear orders. To determine a winner, the given linear orders can be aggregated according to a voting protocol. However, in realistic settings, the voters may often only provide partial orders. This directly leads to the Possible Winner problem that asks, given a set of partial votes, whether a distinguished candidate can still become a winner. In this work, we consider the computational complexity of Possible Winner for the broad class of voting protocols defined by scoring rules. A scoring rule provides a score value for every position which a candidate can have in a linear order. Prominent examples include plurality, k-approval, and Borda. Generalizing previous NP-hardness results for some special cases, we settle the computational complexity for all but one scoring rule. More precisely, for an unbounded number of candidates and unweighted voters, we show that Possible Winner is NP-complete for all pure scoring rules except plurality, veto, and the scoring rule defined by the scoring vector (2,1,...,1,0), while it is solvable in polynomial time for plurality and veto.Comment: minor changes and updates; accepted for publication in JCSS, online version available

The Complexity of Online Manipulation of Sequential Elections

Most work on manipulation assumes that all preferences are known to the manipulators. However, in many settings elections are open and sequential, and manipulators may know the already cast votes but may not know the future votes. We introduce a framework, in which manipulators can see the past votes but not the future ones, to model online coalitional manipulation of sequential elections, and we show that in this setting manipulation can be extremely complex even for election systems with simple winner problems. Yet we also show that for some of the most important election systems such manipulation is simple in certain settings. This suggests that when using sequential voting, one should pay great attention to the details of the setting in choosing one's voting rule. Among the highlights of our classifications are: We show that, depending on the size of the manipulative coalition, the online manipulation problem can be complete for each level of the polynomial hierarchy or even for PSPACE. We obtain the most dramatic contrast to date between the nonunique-winner and unique-winner models: Online weighted manipulation for plurality is in P in the nonunique-winner model, yet is coNP-hard (constructive case) and NP-hard (destructive case) in the unique-winner model. And we obtain what to the best of our knowledge are the first P^NP[1]-completeness and P^NP-completeness results in the field of computational social choice, in particular proving such completeness for, respectively, the complexity of 3-candidate and 4-candidate (and unlimited-candidate) online weighted coalition manipulation of veto elections.Comment: 24 page

On the Exact Amount of Missing Information that Makes Finding Possible Winners Hard

We consider election scenarios with incomplete information, a situation that arises often in practice. There are several models of incomplete information and accordingly, different notions of outcomes of such elections. In one well-studied model of incompleteness, the votes are given by partial orders over the candidates. In this context we can frame the problem of finding a possible winner, which involves determining whether a given candidate wins in at least one completion of a given set of partial votes for a specific voting rule. The Possible Winner problem is well-known to be NP-Complete in general, and it is in fact known to be NP-Complete for several voting rules where the number of undetermined pairs in every vote is bounded only by some constant. In this paper, we address the question of determining precisely the smallest number of undetermined pairs for which the Possible Winner problem remains NP-Complete. In particular, we find the exact values of t for which the Possible Winner problem transitions to being NP-Complete from being in P, where t is the maximum number of undetermined pairs in every vote. We demonstrate tight results for a broad subclass of scoring rules which includes all the commonly used scoring rules (such as plurality, veto, Borda, and k-approval), Copeland^alpha for every alpha in [0,1], maximin, and Bucklin voting rules. A somewhat surprising aspect of our results is that for many of these rules, the Possible Winner problem turns out to be hard even if every vote has at most one undetermined pair of candidates

New Candidates Welcome! Possible Winners with respect to the Addition of New Candidates

In voting contexts, some new candidates may show up in the course of the process. In this case, we may want to determine which of the initial candidates are possible winners, given that a fixed number $k$ of new candidates will be added. We give a computational study of this problem, focusing on scoring rules, and we provide a formal comparison with related problems such as control via adding candidates or cloning.Comment: 34 page