Paper ID: 2310.07150

Determining Winners in Elections with Absent Votes

Qishen Han, Amélie Marian, Lirong Xia

An important question in elections is the determine whether a candidate can be a winner when some votes are absent. We study this determining winner with the absent votes (WAV) problem when the votes are top-truncated. We show that the WAV problem is NP-complete for the single transferable vote, Maximin, and Copeland, and propose a special case of positional scoring rule such that the problem can be computed in polynomial time. Our results in top-truncated rankings differ from the results in full rankings as their hardness results still hold when the number of candidates or the number of missing votes are bounded, while we show that the problem can be solved in polynomial time in either case.

Submitted: Oct 11, 2023