Being caught between a rock and a hard place in an election - Voter deterrence by deletion of candidates

Abstract

We introduce a new problem modeling voter deterrence by deletion of candidates in elections: In an election, the removal of certain candidates might deter some of the voters from casting their votes, and the lower turnout then could cause a preferred candidate to win the election. This is a special case of the variant of the Control problem in which an external agent is allowed to delete candidates and votes in order to make his preferred candidate win, and a generalization of the variant where candidates are deleted, but no votes. We initiate a study of the computational complexity of this problem for several voting systems and obtain -completeness and -hardness with respect to the parameter number of deleted candidates for most of them. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.