0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Some voting procedures can be controlled by the authority conducting the elec-tion (hereinafter, the chairman) to achieve strategic results. For example, itmight be possible to influence the outcome of an election by specifying the se-quence in which alternatives will be considered, or by specifying the compositionof subcommittees that nominate candidates. We study whether the chairmancan easily or only with great difficulty determine how to control a specific elec-tion, and conclude that voting procedures can differ significantly in the effort1required to control them. This suggests that some voting procedures can be in-herently resistant to abuse, while others are vulnerable. We base this distinctionon a measure that is new to voting theory—computational complexity.