Nansons and Baldwins voting rules select a winner by successively eliminating candidates with low Borda scores. We show that these rules have a number of desirable computational properties. In particular, with unweighted votes, it is NP-hard to manipulate either rule with one manipulator, whilst with weighted votes, it is NP-hard to manipulate either rule with a small number of candidates and a coalition of manipulators. As only a couple of other voting rules are known to be NP-hard to manipulate with a single manipulator, Nansons and Baldwins rules appear to be particularly resistant to manipulation from a theoretical perspective. We also propose a number of approximation methods for manipulating these two rules. Experiments demonstrate that both rules are often difficult to manipulate in practice. These results suggest that elimination style voting rules deserve further study.
Download