Robustness Among Multiwinner Voting Rules

Abstract

We investigate how robust are results of committee elections to small changes in the input preference orders, depending on the voting rules used. We find that for typical rules the effect of making a single swap of adjacent candidates in a single preference order is either that (1) at most one committee member can be replaced, or (2) it is possible that the whole committee can be replaced. We also show that the problem of computing the smallest number of swaps that lead to changing the election outcome is typically NP-hard, but there are natural FPT algorithms. Finally, for a number of rules we assess experimentally the average number of random swaps necessary to change the election result.