Safe Voting: Resilience to Abstention and Sybils

Abstract: Voting rules may implement the will of the society when all eligible voters vote, and only them. However, they may fail to do so when sybil (fake or duplicate) votes are present and when only some honest (non sybil) voters actively participate. As, unfortunately, sometimes this is the case, our aim here is to address social choice in the presence of sybils and voter abstention. To do so we build upon the framework of Reality-aware Social Choice: we assume the status-quo as an ever-present distinguished alternative, and study Status-Quo Enforcing voting rules, which add virtual votes in support of the status-quo. We characterize the tradeoff between safety and liveness (the ability of active honest voters to maintain/change the status-quo, respectively) in several domains, and show that the Status-Quo Enforcing voting rules are often optimal. We comment on the applicability of our methods and analyses to the governance of digital communities.