# Determining Winners in Elections with Absent Votes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07150 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07150/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Social Choice Around the Block: On the Computational Social Choice of Blockchain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07777/) (2022)
- [Determining Possible and Necessary Winners Given Partial Orders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.3876/) (2014)
- [The Computational Impact of Partial Votes on Strategic Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.7714/) (2014)
- [Complexity of Manipulation in Elections with Top-truncated Ballots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05900/) (2015)
- [Efficient Computation of Exact IRV Margins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04885/) (2015)
- [Identifying Possible Winners in Ranked Choice Voting Elections with Outstanding Ballots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12741/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

An important question in elections is the determine whether a candidate can be a winner when some votes are absent. We study this determining winner with the absent votes (WAV) problem when the votes are top-truncated. We show that the WAV problem is NP-complete for the single transferable vote, Maximin, and Copeland, and propose a special case of positional scoring rule such that the problem can be computed in polynomial time. Our results in top-truncated rankings differ from the results in full rankings as their hardness results still hold when the number of candidates or the number of missing votes are bounded, while we show that the problem can be solved in polynomial time in either case.