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Normalized Range Voting Broadly Resists Control

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Abstract

We study the behavior of Range Voting and Normalized Range Voting with respect to electoral control. Electoral control encompasses attempts from an election chair to alter the participation or structure of an election in order to change the outcome. We show that a voting system resists a case of control by proving that performing that case of control is computationally hard. Range Voting is a natural extension of approval voting, and Normalized Range Voting is a simple variant which alters each vote to maximize the potential impact of each voter. We show that Normalized Range Voting has among the largest known number of control resistances among natural voting systems.

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Notes

  1. Note that since k-NRV is resistant to deletion of candidates for k=2, this reduction shows resistance for 4-NRV.

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Acknowledgements

For helpful comments and suggestions, I am grateful to Edith Hemaspaandra, who advised my M.S. thesis in which an earlier version of part of this work appeared, Lane A. Hemaspaandra, Preetjot Singh, Andrew Lin, and the anonymous ToCS referees.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627, USA

    Curtis Menton

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  1. Curtis Menton
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Correspondence to Curtis Menton.

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Supported in part by NSF grants CCF-0426761, IIS-0713061, CCF-0915792, and CCF-1101479.

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Menton, C. Normalized Range Voting Broadly Resists Control. Theory Comput Syst 53, 507–531 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-012-9441-0

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