Selecting Voting Locations for Fun and Profit

03/15/2020
by   Zack Fitzsimmons, et al.
0

While manipulative attacks on elections have been well-studied, only recently has attention turned to attacks that account for geographic information, which are extremely common in the real world. The most well known in the media is gerrymandering, in which district border-lines are changed to increase a party's chance to win, but a different geographical manipulation involves influencing the election by selecting the location of polling places, as many people are not willing to go to any distance to vote. In this paper we initiate the study of this manipulation. We find that while it is easy to manipulate the selection of polling places on the line, it becomes difficult already on the plane or in the case of more than two candidates. Moreover, we show that for more than two candidates the problem is inapproximable. However, we find a few restricted cases on the plane where some algorithms perform well. Finally, we discuss how existing results for standard control actions hold in the geographic setting, consider additional control actions in the geographic setting, and suggest directions for future study.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
07/02/2003

How many candidates are needed to make elections hard to manipulate?

In multiagent settings where the agents have different preferences, pref...
research
05/28/2019

Heuristics in Multi-Winner Approval Voting

In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using votin...
research
12/04/2020

Modeling Voters in Multi-Winner Approval Voting

In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using votin...
research
02/13/2020

Approximating Voting Rules from Truncated Ballots

Classical voting rules assume that ballots are complete preference order...
research
03/04/2013

Restricted Manipulation in Iterative Voting: Convergence and Condorcet Efficiency

In collective decision making, where a voting rule is used to take a col...
research
06/09/2020

Designing Stable Elections: A Survey

We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interf...
research
07/19/2020

Election Control by Manipulating Issue Significance

Integrity of elections is vital to democratic systems, but it is frequen...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset