Control Complexity in Bucklin and Fallback Voting

Abstract: Electoral control models ways of changing the outcome of an election via such actions as adding/deleting/partitioning either candidates or voters. To protect elections from such control attempts, computational complexity has been investigated and the corresponding NP-hardness results are termed "resistance." It has been a long-running project of research in this area to classify the major voting systems in terms of their resistance properties. We show that fallback voting, an election system proposed by Brams and Sanver (2009) to combine Bucklin with approval voting, is resistant to each of the common types of control except to destructive control by either adding or deleting voters. Thus fallback voting displays the broadest control resistance currently known to hold among natural election systems with a polynomial-time winner problem. We also study the control complexity of Bucklin voting and show that it performs at least almost as well as fallback voting in terms of control resistance. As Bucklin voting is a special case of fallback voting, each resistance shown for Bucklin voting strengthens the corresponding resistance for fallback voting. Such worst-case complexity analysis is at best an indication of security against control attempts, rather than a proof. In practice, the difficulty of control will depend on the structure of typical instances. We investigate the parameterized control complexity of Bucklin and fallback voting, according to several parameters that are often likely to be small for typical instances. Our results, though still in the worst-case complexity model, can be interpreted as significant strengthenings of the resistance demonstrations based on NP-hardness.