Denison Scientific Association: Electoral control attacks: their interrelations and complexities

While computers have proven useful for solving a wide variety of problems by using algorithms–for instance, finding short routes between locations on a map or solving complex mathematical equations–there are even more problems that cannot be solved by algorithms, and even few that can be solved by efficient algorithms. One of the main areas of research in computational social choice is determining if efficient algorithms exist for particular types of electoral attacks, namely attacks where an election’s organizer has the ability to modify structural components of the election to alter the outcome of that election. This is known as electoral control, and allows us to model gerrymandering, voter suppression, “vote splitting”, among many other attacks. In this talk, we’ll dive into the world of electoral control, taking a quick detour into the realm of computational complexity theory, to finally arrive at study of the relationships that exist between control problems and how they can be leveraged to construct new algorithms, or prove the lack thereof. This talk assumes no background.