{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Manipulating Elections by Changing Voter Perceptions","authors":[{"name":"Junlin Wu","slug":"junlin-wu","given":"Junlin","family":"Wu","affiliation":"Washington University in St. Louis"},{"name":"Andrew Estornell","slug":"andrew-estornell","given":"Andrew","family":"Estornell","affiliation":"Washington University in St. Louis"},{"name":"Lecheng Kong","slug":"lecheng-kong","given":"Lecheng","family":"Kong","affiliation":"Washington University in St. Louis"},{"name":"Yevgeniy Vorobeychik","slug":"yevgeniy-vorobeychik","given":"Yevgeniy","family":"Vorobeychik","affiliation":"Washington University in St. Louis"}],"abstract":"The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the voting public about select candidates, for example, through misinformation. We present a formal model of the impact of perception manipulation on election outcomes in the framework of spatial voting theory, in which the preferences of voters over candidates are generated based on their relative distance in the space of issues. We show that controlling elections in this model is, in general, NP-hard, whether issues are binary or real-valued. However, we demonstrate that critical to intractability is the diversity of opinions on issues exhibited by the voting public. When voter views lack diversity, and we can instead group them into a small number of categories---for example, as a result of political polarization---the election control problem can be solved in polynomial time in the number of issues and candidates for arbitrary scoring rules.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2022/79","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2022/79","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2022/0079.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2022/79.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2022/bibtex/79","volume":{"slug":"2022","title":"Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2022","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2022/","year":2022,"location":"Vienna","dates":"23-29 July 2022","editors":"Luc De Raedt","isbn":"978-1-956792-00-3","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2022"},"section":"Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems","track":"Main Track","number":79,"pages":{"first":557,"last":563},"keywords":["Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Security and Privacy","Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Computational Social Choice"],"videos":[{"label":"Video #1","url":"https://slideslive.com/38986963","length_sec":85,"provider":"slideslive"},{"label":"Video #2","url":"https://slideslive.com/38985106","length_sec":634,"provider":"slideslive"}],"references":[{"position":1,"raw":"[Anshelevich and Postl, 2016] Elliot Anshelevich and John Postl. 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