Title
Optimally Protecting Elections with Uncertainty about Voter Preferences.
Abstract
Election control has always been an important issue of democratic institutions concerned. Considering that a voting rule is indeed susceptible to control by an external agent, it is natural to seek ways to protect elections. Much of prior work has focused on complete voter preferences and approached the problem from the perspective of the computational complexity of election control. However, it is impractical for everyone to have complete voter preferences in real-world scenarios. In addition, when given a voting rule, such as plurality which is widely used in our lives, is easy to control, how to design protection strategies to prevent the occurrence of election control is ignored. In this paper, we model the problem, where the attacker can deploy a single attack such as a denial-of-service attack to convert the voting result through deleting some voter groups, and the defender allocates the limited protection resources to prevent attacks on specific voter groups, as a Stackelberg game. Then we first use the minimax regret decision criterion for uncertainty about voter preferences in the game. We also propose heuristic algorithms to speed up computing minimax regret for the Stackelberg game. Finally, we conduct detailed experiments on both synthetic and real data, which show that our algorithms lead to much better solution quality than other algorithms in the literature.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1016/j.procs.2018.07.168
Procedia Computer Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
Election control,Denial-of-service attack,Stackelberg game,Uncertainty
Heuristic,Voting,Regret,Computer science,Operations research,Artificial intelligence,Democracy,Stackelberg competition,Machine learning,Speedup,Computational complexity theory
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
134
1877-0509
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
4
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mingchu Li146978.10
Yuanpeng Cao200.68