Normalized Range Voting Broadly Resists Control

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that Normalized Range Voting is highly resistant to electoral control attempts, making it a robust voting system against structural manipulations.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes Normalized Range Voting, showing it resists many control scenarios that can alter election outcomes, unlike other voting systems.

Findings

Normalized Range Voting resists many control types.

Performing control in this system is computationally infeasible.

It has among the largest control resistances among natural voting systems.

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 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 infeasible. 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 number of control resistances among natural voting systems.