  In many instances of election, the electorate appears to be a composite of
partisan and independent voters. Given that partisans are not likely to convert
to a different party, a main goal for a party could be to mobilize independent
voters toward the party with the help of strong leadership, mass media,
partisans, and effects of peer-to-peer influence. Based on the exact solution
of the classical voter model dynamics in the presence of perfectly partisan
voters (i.e., zealots), we propose a computational method to maximize the share
of the party in a social network of independent voters by pinning control
strategy. The party, corresponding to the controller or zealots, optimizes the
nodes to be controlled given the information about the connectivity of
independent voters and the set of nodes that the opponent party controls. We
show that controlling hubs is generally a good strategy, whereas the optimized
strategy is even better. The superiority of the optimized strategy is
particularly eminent when the independent voters are connected as directed
rather than undirected networks.
