  Constructive election control considers the problem of an adversary who seeks
to sway the outcome of an electoral process in order to ensure that their
favored candidate wins. We consider the computational problem of constructive
election control via issue selection. In this problem, a party decides which
political issues to focus on to ensure victory for the favored candidate. We
also consider a variation in which the goal is to maximize the number of voters
supporting the favored candidate. We present strong negative results, showing,
for example, that the latter problem is inapproximable for any constant factor.
On the positive side, we show that when issues are binary, the problem becomes
tractable in several cases, and admits a 2-approximation in the two-candidate
case. Finally, we develop integer programming and heuristic methods for these
problems.
