Complexity of Manipulation in Elections with Partial Votes

In the computational social choice literature, there has been great interest in understanding how computational complexity can act as a barrier against manipulation of elections. Much of this literature, however, makes the assumption that the voters or agents specify a complete preference ordering over the set of candidates. There are many multiagent systems applications, and even real-world elections, where this assumption is not warranted, and this in turn raises the question "How hard is it to manipulate elections if the agents reveal only partial preference orderings?". It is this question that we study in this paper. In particular, we look at the weighted manipulation problem -- both constructive and destructive manipulation -- when such partial voting is allowed and when there are only a bounded number of candidates. We study the exact number of candidates that are required to make manipulation hard for all scoring rules, for elimination versions of all scoring rules, for the plurality with runoff rule, for a family of election systems known as Copeland$^{\alpha}$, and for the maximin protocol.