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Voting systems are common tools in a variety of areas. This paper studies parameterized computational complexity of control of Plurality, Condorcet and Approval voting systems, respectively. The types of controls considered include adding or deleting candidates or voters, under constructive or destructive setting. We obtain the following results: (1) constructive control by adding candidates in Plurality voting is W[2]-hard with respect to the parameter "number of added candidates", (2) destruct
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Theoretical Computer Science 410 (2009) 2746–2753
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Theoretical Computer Science
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tcs
Parameterized computational complexity of control problems in voting
systems
I
Hong Liu
∗
, Haodi Feng, Daming Zhu, Junfeng Luan
Algorithms Group, School of Computer Science and Technology, Software Park Campus, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong Province, China
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 5 November 2008
Received in revised form 12 February 2009
Accepted 9 April 2009
Communicated by X. Deng
Keywords:
Voting systems
Constructive control
Destructive control
Plurality voting
Condorcet voting
Approval voting
Parameterized complexity
a b s t r a c t
Voting systems are common tools in a variety of areas. This paper studies parameterized
computational complexity of control of Plurality, Condorcet and Approval voting systems,
respectively. The types of controls considered include adding or deleting candidates
or voters, under constructive or destructive setting. We obtain the following results:
(1) constructive control by adding candidates in Plurality voting is W[2]-hard with
respect to the parameter ‘‘number of added candidates’’, (2) destructive control by adding
candidates in Plurality voting is W[2]-hard with respect to the parameter ‘‘number of
added candidates’’, (3) constructive control by adding voters in Condorcet voting is
W[1]-hard with respect to the parameter ‘‘number of added voters’’, (4) constructive
control by deleting voters in Condorcet voting is W[1]-hard with respect to the parameter
‘‘number of deleted voters’’, (5) constructive control by adding voters in Approval voting is
W[1]-hard with respect to the parameter ‘‘number of added voters’’, and (6) constructive
control by deleting voters in Approval voting is W[2]-hard with respect to the parameter
‘‘number of deleted voters’’.
© 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Voting systems provide a general framework for preference aggregation, in which each agent expresses a preference
order over a set of candidates, and some voting rule [4] is applied to compute the winner(s). These systems are used not
only in political elections but also in a variety of other areas, for example, meta-search engines [9] and planning in multi-
agent systems [10].
In addition to work that focuses on winner(s) determination, researchers have spent much effort on studying, from the
computational complexity view, the potential dangers that various voting systems would face. The dangers most studied
so far include manipulation [1,7], control [2,13,17,19], and bribery [12,13]. This paper focuses on control of voting systems.
In their seminal paper [2], Bartholdi et al. put forward the following general control problem: Is it computationally hard
or easy for an authority conducting the voting procedure (called chair) to cause a distinguished candidate to be the unique
winner through control of the candidate or voter set? Hemaspaandra et al. [17] called this general problem as constructive
control problem and also put forward a complementary destructive control problem. While in constructive setting the chair
aims to ensure that a specified desirable candidate is the (unique) winner, in destructive setting the chair tries to ensure
that a specified detested candidate is not the (unique) winner.
With respect to different settings (constructive or destructive), different types of control (e.g. adding or deleting
candidates or voters), and different voting systems, different variants of control problem can be formed. Variants of control
I
Research supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (60603007).
∗
Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 13001727985.
E-mail addresses: hong-liu@sdu.edu.cn, hongliu2005@gmail.com (H. Liu), fenghaodi@sdu.edu.cn (H. Feng), dmzhu@sdu.edu.cn (D. Zhu),
jfluan@sdu.edu.cn (J. Luan).
0304-3975/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.tcs.2009.04.004
H. Liu et al. / Theoretical Computer Science 410 (2009) 2746–2753 2747
Table 1
Summary of results.
Plurality Condorcet Approval
Control by Con. Des. Con. Des. Con. Des.
AC W[2]-hard W[2]-hard
DC W[2]-hard[3] W[1]-hard[3]
AV W[1]-hard W[1]-hard
DV W[1]-hard W[2]-hard
Results new to this paper are in boldface. AC = Adding Candidates, DC = Deleting Candidates,
AV = Adding Voters, DV = Deleting Voters. Con. = Constructive, Des. = Destructive.
problem for Sincere-Strategy Preference-Based Approval voting system was studied in [11]. The computational complexity
of variants of control problems (with respect to ten types of control and constructive and destructive settings) of Plurality,
Condorcet and Approval voting systems obtained so far by researchers were summarized in [17]. We are interested in four
(out of the ten) types of controls: adding or deleting candidates or voters. We can see from the summary that, with respect
to these four types of controls, eight variants of control problem are NP-hard.
1
Although NP-hardness can in theory be a
barrier to the implementation of certain control, more theoretical analysis is necessary.
More recently, some researchers have started to study the computational complexity of the control problem under
parameterized complexity framework [8,15,20], e.g., [3,14]. A review can be found in [18]. We refer readers to [3] for
a review of the motivations. In practice, it is reasonable to expect that, in some cases, the added/deleted candidates/voters
are in a small amount compared to the main body of already qualified candidates or registered voters, for the chair to
escape detection of his (or her) malicious aim. So, the number of added/deleted candidates/voters are reasonably considered
as ‘‘natural’’ parameters of the problem. Betzler and Uhlmann [3] studied two of the eight variants of control problem,
which are NP-hard as mentioned above. They proved that, with respect to the parameter ‘‘number of deleted candidates’’,
constructive control of Plurality voting by deleting candidates is W [2]-hard and destructive control of Plurality voting by
deleting candidates is W [1]-hard. To the best of our knowledge, parameterized complexity of the other six variants of control
problem are still open. We study them in this paper. For this purpose, with the number of added or deleted candidates or
voters as parameter, we first re-formalize the six variants of control problem in a ‘‘parameterized’’ way. Then, we devise
parameterized reductions to prove the W [1]-hardness or W [2]-hardness of them, respectively. The results obtained are
summarized in Table 1.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In the second section, we describe the six variants of control problem and
some notions and concepts used in this paper are introduced. In the following three sections, parameterized complexities
of these six variants of control problem are studied, respectively. Conclusion is given in the last section.
2. Preliminaries
Throughout this work, a voting system (or an election) consists of a set of candidates, a set of voters specified by their
preferences and a voting rule for selecting winner(s). The Plurality, Condorcet, and Approval voting rules are described as
follows:
Plurality: Each candidate receives one vote for each voter that prefers it first. The candidate with the most votes wins.
Condorcet: The candidate who would defeat any other in a pairwise Plurality voting wins. According to the Condorcet
Paradox, whenever there are at least three candidates, a Condorcet winner may not exist due to cycles in preferences [5].
However, whenever one does exist, a Condorcet winner is of course the unique winner.
Approval: Every voter either approves or disapproves of each candidate, and the candidate with the maximum number
of approvals wins.
Suppose there is a candidates set C = {c
1
, c
2
, . . . , c
m
}. In Plurality and Condorcet voting systems, for any two candidates
c
i
, c
j
∈ C , if c
i
is preferred to c
j
, it is denoted by c
i
c
j
. We assume that the preferences are transitive, strict (no ties),
and complete (for any two candidates c
i
and c
j
, c
i
c
j
or c
j
c
i
). A voter’s preferences are represented as a list like
c
i
1
c
i
2
· · · c
i
m
, where {c
i
1
, c
i
m
, . . . , c
i
m
} = C. Often in this paper, we insert one or more candidate subsets into
such preference list, where we assume some arbitrary, fixed order of the candidates within each subset. In Approval voting
system, a voter’s preferences are reflected by a 0/1 vector (1 for approval and 0 for disapproval).
Following a similar fashion in [2,17], we describe the six parameterized variants of control problem:
Constructive Control by Adding Candidates in Plurality Voting (Plurality-CC-AC)
Given: A set C of qualified candidates, a particular candidate c ∈ C, a set B of possible spoiler candidates, and a set P of
voters with preferences over C ∪ B.
Parameter: A positive integer k.
Question: Is there a subset B
0
, with |B
0
| 6 k, of B, whose entry into the election would assure that c is the unique winner?
1
A voting system is said to be immune to a type of control if a non-unique-winner can never be made the unique winner by this type of control, and is
said to be resistant to this type of control if the corresponding control problem is NP-hard, and vulnerable if polynomial-time solvable [17].
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