Usually a voting rule or correspondence requires agents to give their preferences as linear orders. However, in some cases it is impractical for an agent to give a linear order over all the alternatives. It has been suggested to let agents submit partial orders instead. Then, given a profile of partial orders and a candidate c, two important questions arise: first, is c guaranteed to win, and second, is it still possible for c to win? These are the necessary winner and possible winner problems, respectively. We consider the setting where the number of alternatives is unbounded and the votes are unweighted. We prove that for Copeland, maximin, Bucklin, and ranked pairs, the possible winner problem is NP-complete; also, we give a sufficient condition on scoring rules for the possible winner problem to be NP-complete (Borda satisfies this condition). We also prove that for Copeland and ranked pairs, the necessary winner problem is coNP-complete. All the hardness results hold even when the number of undetermined pairs in each vote is no more than a constant. We also present polynomial-time algorithms for the necessary winner problem for scoring rules, maximin, and Bucklin.

To make a joint decision, agents (or voters) are often required to provide their preferences as linear orders. To determine a winner, the given linear orders can be aggregated according to a voting protocol. However, in realistic settings, the voters may often only provide partial orders. This directly leads to the POSSIBLE WINNER problem that asks, given a set of partial votes, whether a distinguished candidate can still become a winner. In this work, we consider the computational complexity of POSSIBLE WINNER for the broad class of voting protocols defined by scoring rules. A scoring rule provides a score value for every position which a candidate can have in a linear order. Prominent examples include plurality, k-approval, and Borda. Generalizing previous NP-hardness results for some special cases, we settle the computational complexity for all but one scoring rule. More precisely, for an unbounded number of candidates and unweighted voters, we show that POSSIBLE WINNER is NP-complete for all pure scoring rules except plurality, veto, and the scoring rule defined by the scoring vector (2, 1,...,1, 0), while it is solvable in polynomial time for plurality and veto.

Abstract. The POSSIBLE WINNER problem asks whether some distinguished candidate may become the winner of an election when the given incomplete votes (partial orders) are extended into complete ones (linear orders) in a favorable way. Under the k-approval protocol, for every voter, the best k candidates of his or her preference order get one point. A candidate with maximum total number of points wins. The POSSIBLE WINNER problem for k-approval is NP-complete even if there are only two votes (and k is part of the input). In addition, it is NPcomplete for every fixed k ∈ {2,..., m − 2} with m denoting the number of candidates if the number of votes is unbounded. We investigate the parameterized complexity with respect to the combined parameter k and “number of incomplete votes ” t, and with respect to the combined parameter k ′: = m − k and t. For both cases, we use kernelization to show fixed-parameter tractability. However, we show that whereas there is a polynomial-size problem kernel with respect to (t, k ′), it is very unlikely that there is a polynomial-size kernel for (t, k). We provide additional fixed-parameter algorithms for some special cases. 1

In a voting system, sometimes multiple new alternatives will join the election after the voters’ preferences over the initial alternatives have been revealed. Computing whether a given alternative can be a co-winner when multiple new alternatives join the election is called the possible co-winner with new alternatives (PcWNA) problem, introduced by Chevaleyre et al. [4, 5]. In this paper, we show that the PcWNA problems are NP-complete for the Bucklin, Copeland0, and Simpson (a.k.a. maximin) rule, even when the number of new alternatives is no more than a constant. We also show that the PcWNA problem can be solved in polynomial time for plurality with runoff. For the approval rule, we define three different ways to extend a linear order with new alternatives, and characterize the computational complexity of the PcWNA problem for each of them. 1

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We study the problem of computing possible and necessary winners for partially specified weighted and unweighted tournaments. This problem arises naturally in elections with incompletely specified votes, partially completed sports competitions, and more generally in any scenario where the outcome of some pairwise comparisons is not yet fully known. We specifically consider a number of well-known solution concepts—including the uncovered set, Borda, ranked pairs, and maximin—and show that for most of them possible and necessary winners can be identified in polynomial time. These positive algorithmic results stand in sharp contrast to earlier results concerning possible and necessary winners given partially specified preference profiles.

Winner determination in voting trees with incomplete