🤖 AI Summary
Digital community governance suffers from distorted social choice due to the coexistence of Sybil identities and high voter abstention rates. Method: We propose the “State–Status Reinforced Voting Rule,” which anchors decisions to the status quo by pre-allocating virtual votes to it, thereby simultaneously ensuring safety (resistance to adversarial changes) and liveness (enabling honest majorities to enact legitimate updates). Contribution/Results: We formally characterize the safety–liveness trade-off for the first time and prove that this rule achieves optimality across multiple preference domains—including single-peaked and single-crossing preferences. Compared to conventional mechanisms, our design significantly enhances robustness against Sybil attacks and low participation in distributed systems, while preserving decision authenticity and improving practical deployability.
📝 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.
