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Combinatorial Voter Control in Elections

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8635))

Abstract

Voter control problems model situations such as an external agent trying to affect the result of an election by adding voters, for example by convincing some voters to vote who would otherwise not attend the election. Traditionally, voters are added one at a time, with the goal of making a distinguished alternative win by adding a minimum number of voters. In this paper, we initiate the study of combinatorial variants of control by adding voters: In our setting, when we choose to add a voter v, we also have to add a whole bundle κ(v) of voters associated with v. We study the computational complexity of this problem for two of the most basic voting rules, namely the Plurality rule and the Condorcet rule.

JC was supported by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. PF was supported by the DFG project PAWS (NI 369/10). NT was supported by the DFG Research Training Group “Methods for Discrete Structures” (GRK 1408). This work has been partly supported by COST Action IC1205 on Computational Social Choice.

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Chen, J., Faliszewski, P., Niedermeier, R., Talmon, N. (2014). Combinatorial Voter Control in Elections. In: Csuhaj-Varjú, E., Dietzfelbinger, M., Ésik, Z. (eds) Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science 2014. MFCS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8635. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44465-8_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44465-8_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-44464-1

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