Manipulated Electorates and Information Aggregation

We study information aggregation with a biased election organizer who recruits voters at some cost. Voters are symmetric ex-ante and prefer policy a in state a and policy b in state B, but the organizer prefers policy a regardless of the state. Each recruited voter observes a private signal about the unknown state but does not learn the size of the electorate. In contrast to existing results for large elections, there are equilibria in which information aggregation fails: As the voter recruitment cost vanishes, the organizer can ensure that policy a is implemented with high probability independently of the state