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Some voting schemes that are in principle susceptible to control are nevertheless resistant in practice due to excessive computational costs; others are vulnerable. We illustrate this in detail for plurality voting and for Condorcet voting.

In bucket brigade" manufacturing, such as recently introduced to the apparel industry, a production line has n workers moving among m stations, where each w orker independently follows a simple rule that determines what to do next. Our analysis suggests and experiments con rm that if the workers are sequenced from slowest to fastest then, independently of the stations at which they begin, a stable partition of work will spontaneously emerge. Furthermore, the production rate will converge to a v alue that, for typical production lines, is the maximum possible among all ways of organizing the workers and stations.

We give evidence that Single Tranferable Vote (STV) is computationally resistant to manipulation: It is NP-complete to determine whether there exists a (possibly insincere) preference that will elect a favored candidate, even in an election for a single seat. Thus strategic voting under STV is qualitatively more difficult than under other commonly-used voting schemes. Furthermore, this resistance to manipulation is inherent to STV and does not depend on hopeful extraneous assumptions like the presumed difficulty of learning the preferences of the other voters.We also prove that it is NP-complete to recognize when an STV election violates monotonicity. This suggests that non-monotonicity in STV elections might be perceived as less threatening since it is in effect "hidden" and hard to exploit for strategic advantage.