Navigating the Complexity Landscape of Nominee Selection in Schulze Voting

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cechlárová, Katarína, Rothe, Jörg, Schierreich, Šimon, Schlotter, Ildikó
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Cechlárová, Katarína
Rothe, Jörg
Schierreich, Šimon
Schlotter, Ildikó
author_facet Cechlárová, Katarína
Rothe, Jörg
Schierreich, Šimon
Schlotter, Ildikó
contents We study the Possible President problem and the Necessary President problem for Schulze voting, a rule that, due to its many desirable axiomatic properties, is popular in practice. In both problems, we are given an election with the candidates partitioned into a set of parties, and we are interested in questions about a given distinguished party. In the Possible President problem, we ask whether it is possible for the parties to each nominate exactly one candidate such that the nominee of the distinguished party is a Schulze winner of the resulting election with only the nominees running. In the Necessary President problem, we ask whether the distinguished party's nominee is a Schulze winner of the resulting election, irrespective of the nomination from the other parties. Rothe and Woitaschik have shown that Possible President is NP-complete and Necessary President is coNP-complete for Schulze elections. We complement and improve their results by a more fine-grained analysis: we determine the parameterized complexity of both problems with respect to all possible parameterizations, where we consider each of three natural parameters -- the number of voters, the maximum party size, and the number of parties -- to be either a constant, a parameter, or unbounded. In particular, we obtain dichotomies regarding the number of voters for both problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_11933
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Navigating the Complexity Landscape of Nominee Selection in Schulze Voting
Cechlárová, Katarína
Rothe, Jörg
Schierreich, Šimon
Schlotter, Ildikó
Computer Science and Game Theory
We study the Possible President problem and the Necessary President problem for Schulze voting, a rule that, due to its many desirable axiomatic properties, is popular in practice. In both problems, we are given an election with the candidates partitioned into a set of parties, and we are interested in questions about a given distinguished party. In the Possible President problem, we ask whether it is possible for the parties to each nominate exactly one candidate such that the nominee of the distinguished party is a Schulze winner of the resulting election with only the nominees running. In the Necessary President problem, we ask whether the distinguished party's nominee is a Schulze winner of the resulting election, irrespective of the nomination from the other parties. Rothe and Woitaschik have shown that Possible President is NP-complete and Necessary President is coNP-complete for Schulze elections. We complement and improve their results by a more fine-grained analysis: we determine the parameterized complexity of both problems with respect to all possible parameterizations, where we consider each of three natural parameters -- the number of voters, the maximum party size, and the number of parties -- to be either a constant, a parameter, or unbounded. In particular, we obtain dichotomies regarding the number of voters for both problems.
title Navigating the Complexity Landscape of Nominee Selection in Schulze Voting
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11933