journal article
LitStream Collection
Complexity of control by partitioning veto elections and of control by adding candidates to plurality elections
Maushagen, Cynthia; Rothe, Jörg
2017 Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
doi: 10.1007/s10472-017-9565-7
Control by partition refers to situations where an election chair seeks to influence the outcome of an election by partitioning either the candidates or the voters into two groups, thus creating two first-round subelections that determine who will take part in a final round. The model of partition-of-voters control attacks is remotely related to “gerrymandering” (maliciously resizing election districts). While the complexity of control by partition has been studied thoroughly for many voting systems, there are no such results known for the important veto voting system. We settle the complexity of control by partition for veto in a broad variety of models. In addition, by giving a counterexample we observe that a reduction from the literature (Chen et al. 2015) showing the parameterized complexity of control by adding candidates to plurality elections, parameterized by the number of voters, is technically flawed, and we show how this reduction can be adapted to make it correct.