This paper (joint with Reyhaneh Reyhani) will be presented at COMSOC 2010. It deals with the concept of “safe manipulation”, whereby an agent can attempt to manipulate the result of an election without risk, provided that voters of other preferences vote sincerely but irrespective of the number of like-minded voters that also try to vote strategically. It was introduced by Slinko and White in COMSOC 2008.
Abstract: The concept of safe manipulation has recently been introduced by Slinko and White. We show how to compute the asymptotic probability that a safe manipulation exists for a given scoring rule under the uniform distribution on voting situations (the so- called Impartial Anonymous Culture). The technique used is computation of volumes of convex polytopes. We present explicit numerical results in the 3-candidate case.