English

Candidate nomination for Condorcet-consistent voting rules

Computer Science and Game Theory 2025-02-06 v1

Abstract

Consider elections where the set of candidates is partitioned into parties, and each party must nominate exactly one candidate. The Possible President problem asks whether some candidate of a given party can become the winner of the election for some nominations from other parties. We perform a multivariate computational complexity analysis of Possible President for a range of Condorcet-consistent voting rules, namely for Copelandα^\alpha for α[0,1]\alpha \in [0,1] and Maximin. The parameters we study are the number of voters, the number of parties, and the maximum size of a party. For all voting rules under consideration, we obtain dichotomies based on the number of voters, classifying NP\mathsf{NP}-complete and polynomial-time solvable cases. Moreover, for each NP\mathsf{NP}-complete variant, we determine the parameterized complexity of every possible parameterization with the studied parameters as either (a) fixed-parameter tractable, (b) W[1]\mathsf{W}[1]-hard but in XP\mathsf{XP}, or (c) paraNP\mathsf{paraNP}-hard, outlining the limits of tractability for these problems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.03197,
  title  = {Candidate nomination for Condorcet-consistent voting rules},
  author = {Ildikó Schlotter and Katarína Cechlárová},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.03197},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted at AAMAS 2025

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:33:29.710Z