Solving Hard Control Problems in Voting Systems via Integer Programming

TL;DR

This paper introduces flexible integer programming formulations to efficiently solve complex, NP-hard election control problems across various voting systems, enabling manipulation of large-scale elections.

Contribution

It presents novel ILP models for election control problems that are adaptable to any number of candidates and voters, demonstrating practical efficiency with standard solvers.

Findings

ILP formulations effectively solve large-scale election control problems

Approaches work efficiently with standard ILP solvers like Cplex

Methods are applicable to a wide range of voting systems

Abstract

Voting problems are central in the area of social choice. In this article, we investigate various voting systems and types of control of elections. We present integer linear programming (ILP) formulations for a wide range of NP-hard control problems. Our ILP formulations are flexible in the sense that they can work with an arbitrary number of candidates and voters. Using the off-the-shelf solver Cplex, we show that our approaches can manipulate elections with a large number of voters and candidates efficiently.