The Complexity of Manipulative Attacks in Nearly Single-Peaked Electorates (Extended Abstract)

Many electoral control and manipulation problems — which we will refer to in general as manipulative actions problems — are NP-hard in the general case.  Many of these problems fall into polynomial time if the electorate is single-peaked, i.e., is  polarized along some axis/issue. However, real-world electorates are not truly single-peaked — for example, there may be some maverick voters — and to take this into account, we study the complexity of manipulative-action algorithms for  the case of nearly single-peaked electorates.