Sybil-Resilient Social Choice with Low Voter Turnout

We address social choice in the presence of sybils (fake or duplicate votes) and low turnout, two behaviors that may each distort the will of the society. To do so we assume the status quo as an ever-present distinguished alternative. We propose a general Reality Enforcing mechanism, which can be combined with arbitrary voting rules and operates by adding virtual votes that support the status quo. We measure the tradeoff between safety and liveness (the ability of non-abstaining non-sybil voters to maintain or to change the status quo, respectively) in a variety of voting domains and show a tight inherent limit to the amount of sybils and abstentions that can be tolerated.