Solving hard control problems in voting systems via integer programming

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. and Association of European Operational Research Societies (EURO) within the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS). All rights reserved. Voting problems are central in the area of social choice. In this article, we investigate various voting systems and types of control of elections. We present integer linear programming (ILP) formulations for a wide range of NP-hard control problems. Our ILP formulations are flexible in the sense that they can work with an arbitrary number of candidates and voters. Using the off-the-shelf solver Cplex, we show that our approaches can manipulate elections with a large number of voters and candidates efficiently.